First it was a question
by Kenworth
Summary: 1 gay boy, 1 future minister, and an activist chick talkin' Christianity, although maybe not like you've heard it before.
1. Default Chapter

About a Boy  
And some other people.   
Disclaimer: Jeff and Camilla, the heroes of this tale, belong to themselves, their God and the world, in whatever order you like. I belong, I suppose, to me; various artists mentioned all retain copyright on their own work, as noted within the text. God is on His own. Furthermore, I certainly can't speak for "Christians." I offer this in the spirit of an alternative. The people in my story do exist, but I have occasionally taken some liberties in reporting -- using statements from e-mails as dialogue, combining conversations that took place over several meetings, removing certain irrelevant and personal tangents. There's an Arabic word, Anglicized as "niyah," which measures intention as part of an act. My intention is to present a true representation of a different side of Christianity, based on my experiences. One of Camilla's favorite song lyrics is a two-line snippet from Harry Chapin's "Basic Protest Song," If we don't push for Paradise, we're settling for hell. I'd like to think this story is a little bit about that, and people who believe that, and who not only believe that, but live it.  
  
Prologue  
  
Flipping through this section, looking for something to amuse my friends, I came across two pieces which greatly bothered me, and was somewhat gratified to see reviewers act in the same way. I won't quote them (that seems a bit unfair), but they included, most noteably, a number of slurs on Muslims and other non-Christians, a horrifying lack of historical comprehension, and condescension towards people who "just don't get it," which is hardly an effective way of preaching.  
I also find it offensive and self-serving in the extreme for someone to state so objectively that they "know" the cause of the September 11th attacks, particularly someone who is obviously uneducated about other religions, and that the rest of us are deluded fools for not agreeing with them. America is indeed a culturally Christian nation, if a politically secular one -- we are also heavily consumeristic (particularly in comparison to our productivity), isolationist, arrogant and prejudiced. We refuse to cooperate with the rest of the world unless they play by our rules only -- Kyoto, the International Criminal Court, paying our UN dues, etc. Perhaps we learned this from fundamentalist Christianity, infamous for enforcing limits and negating those on the margins. When I and many people think of Christianity, our experience has typically been what Christianity says not to do -- not to kiss boys if you're a boy, not to have premarital sex no matter who you are, but especially if you're a girl, if you do and get pregnant, you should marry the father even if you don't love him or think he's prepared to be a parent, and should not even consider terminating the pregnancy. Love thy neighbor as thyself when they ARE like yourself, not when they are a different race or religion or sexual orientation. Christianity is simultaneously the inspiration of some of the world's greatest art and atrocities. The Sistine Chapel and the Ku Klux Klan. Mozart, Beethoven and Bach as well as inquisitions and pogroms. And yet neither America nor conservative Christianity is willing to deal with both sides of the equation. In our "noble" fight to destroy communism, we unseated elected officials and assisted in bloody military coups (and added "under God" to the pledge of allegiance). September 11 is also the anniversary of the American-aided installation of Pinochet in Chile. Over 3000 people died that day, too. And we helped. Nor was this an isolated event. Likewise, Christianity (as evidenced on this board) conveniently claims that the Spanish Inquistion, the Crusades and any other moment that might indict Christianity was the "work of Satan." Never mind that the Inquisition was carried out by the best and brightest of the Church's scions. Never mind that in 2001, there were still voices (including Ann Coulter) calling for us to take back the Holy Land. Never mind the total destruction of culture in the Americas. Much as I hate to fall back on quoting "Spider-Man," it is true that with great power comes great responsibility, and both America and fundamentalist Christians seem to want to shirk this, whether out of true isolationist ignorance or merely a fundamental lack of compassion.  
And how do I know some of these authors are uneducated about their faith and others? Well, it's simply not polite to get the name of the adherents of a faith wrong; it shows you haven't bothered to learn the most rudimentary facts about them. "Islam's" and "Muslims" is a bit beyond a typo, too. It's offensive in the same sense as archaic spelling is offensive. Nor do all Christians agree with what any given person might write here.   
Not to mention I find this a bit hard to take seriously when someone said "Hey, you're experiencing persecution! That means you're blessed...lucky duck" and in another piece stated, "Christians are persecuted, but they don't mind." I suppose if you consider someone disagreeing with you to be persecution, than you really must learn not to mind. And that, if anything, is why people might accuse the author of a persecution complex.   
These are some striking quotes, taken from articles at www.religioustolerance.org.  
Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue (implicated in the murder of health care workers): "I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good...Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a Biblical duty; we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism."  
Pat Robertson: "It is interesting, that termites don't build things, and the great builders of our nation almost to a man have been Christians, because Christians have the desire to build something. He is motivated by love of man and God, so he builds. The people who have come into [our] institutions [today] are primarily termites. They are into destroying institutions that have been built by Christians, whether it is universities, governments, our own traditions, that we have.... The termites are in charge now, and that is not the way it ought to be, and the time has arrived for a godly fumigation."   
A former SBC president and founding father of the Christian Coalition, The Rev. Bailey Smith, said, at the 1987 Southern Baptist Convention general meeting, "God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew." He was given a standing ovation. In 1994-JUN-24, during a talk before 15,000 people at a Religious Roundtable meeting in Dallas TX, he said: "With all due respect to those dear people, my friend, God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew."  
These men represent the public face of Christianity in America, and I am trying to learn around them. However, I cannot summon up much sympathy for those who feel "persecuted" by pluralism.  
This is not to imply that I enjoy the idea of anyone being persecuted, only that I refuse to grant Christians any exclusive rights to such, particularly when many of them haven't had much sympathy for me and my "kind," -- and some have gone so far as to promote such. Not 1500 or 500 or 50 years ago, but now, in contemporary America, there are Christians who want me dead, figuratively (see www.tencommandments.org, if you like) and literally, as I will explain anon. 


	2. Chapter 1

Chapter 1  
And thus, I begin.  
  
I grew up with no particular religious upbringing, the offspring of two parents who had been driven from their respective churches because they could no longer stomach certain ideas portrayed therein. My mother, a psychologist, left when her Baptist church when a schizophrenic killed himself after a supposed "healing service" in which the Pastor and church members attempted to "drive the demons out." My father, the son and grandson of good Irish Catholics, left because he found the Church's attitudes to women to be odious, particularly after he fell in love. Because I was raised in Middle America, however, I was certainly steeped in Christianity and the odd mixture that is considered to be "Christian values." Christianity is virtually inescapable in America. To be patriotic, we are taught, is to be Christian -- we cannot pledge allegiance without reference to God, our patriotic songs are simultaneously hymns, our money, bizarrely, claims a spiritual reliability (this always struck me as odd, considering the famous dictate of "rendering unto Caesar." But I digress.) Likewise, Christianity is often held as a synonym for virtue or morality, both in the Calvinist work-ethic (hard work is rewarded, and one's rewards represent one's worth) and the much-mourned loss of "family values" -- a value based on negation, making it clear that single parents, working (professionally) mothers, and various other permutations of the 1950s nuclear family simply are not good enough.   
  
I knew when I was quite young that somehow I would never easily slip into this niche. I understood in some way that I was "different" at the age of four, was able to identify that it had something to do with boys -- being a "real" boy, at least -- by age seven, and aware, if not able to admit, that I was gay by the time I was ten. Living where I did, I had no desire or pretensions of "flaunting" my deviance. As in one of Juliet's first lines, having a romantic relationship was "an honor I dreamed not of." I had no expectations of taking a boy to my senior Prom, or writing their names on my notebooks. All I wanted -- well, no, because of course I wanted more -- but all I asked was that I be permitted to drift through my small town alone with my books and sketch pads, keeping up a semblance of cordiality with my classmates and earning a GPA that would remove me to a different kind of place.   
  
Yet my very presence was offensive to certain people, my very existence an insult to their Christian faith. I never "outed" myself, but rumors abound, and people knew. And thus it came to pass that one night, as I walked home alone, I was waylaid by three of my classmates in an isolated lot near one of the nine local churches.  
  
I found out later they had been attending a Youth Meeting and that the next night, they attended a Christian rock concert. That night, however, they occupied themselves with beating me almost to death.  
  
One of them wore a white T-shirt emblazoned with the motif "WWJD?" What would Jesus do, indeed -- apparently, smash my homosexual kneecaps to pieces. Another one wore a necklace with a cross on it, which was the last conscious image in my mind before blessedly I lost consciousness while the vast majority of the cuts and blows were laid upon my body. Lest there be any confusion about what I had done to merit this, one of them wrote on my chest, using several words that would increase the rating of my little tale if I repeated them here, and declared I was going to hell.  
  
Obviously I did not, as I am writing this now. I was knocked unconscious on a Friday evening and awoke early Sunday morning, a bit of irony that did not escape me. At my "resurrection," I had some vague awareness of pain and of sound -- my mother, and worse, perhaps, for its rarity, my father sobbing, a strange voice murmuring that "amputation may still be necessary," another strange voice asking if I was a Christian. I tried to answer -- not him so much, but to tell my parents to stop crying -- and missed my father's angry answer, but heard the voice coldly saying he would pray for my soul. My father snapped back that he might pray for me to walk, instead.   
  
That same hospital chaplain -- for it was he -- came back when I had been awake for some hours. They still did not know if the damage to my leg was at all salvageable -- infection was still the real danger. After all, I had lain alone, hurt and bleeding, for several hours. But I had asked my parents -- so pale and gray -- to go home and sleep, or at least sleep here at the hospital, and not feel the need to keep a vigil, so at the moment he returned I was alone. Too groggy to be very coherent, but enough to realize uncomfortably that he was telling me God would forgive me if I stopped rebelling against His ways and bowed to righteous authority. He told me how close I had come to Hell -- perpetual flame and darkness, and loneliness. Around the morphine, it was unbearable, and I was too confused to call for help. I lay there helpless as he talked to me about abomination, and how this should be a call for me to mend my ways, these boys were "agents" in what would help me live a cleaner life, with his help and I should look upon them with humble gratitude. Thankfully, a nurse came in (if there was an agent of God in that room, in my mind it was she) and saw me crying and sent him out -- dragged him out, actually. I found out later that I asked, sobbing (how this would embarrass me) what I had done. She kept saying that I hadn't done anything, that some people had hurt me, and I hadn't done anything, but with the sanctioned word of God, heavy as incense in the air, it was hard to believe her.  
  
This is not to imply that even then, I thought all Christians were like those boys in the alley, or that chaplain. Certainly I never believed that all Christians would have enjoyed assaulting me or rejoiced in my death. But there were enough to make the Christian American world even more frightening and isolating. Even when the convoluted message was "hate the sin, love the sinner," there was still no safe place, because I knew they were not separate. I could no more change my sexuality than I could my height. Therefore, there was no difference. I was hated, hated by the God who was supposed to love the world so much. And it was very, very lonely.  
  
And perhaps even more unnerving was the lack of outrage. Where I live there are no hate crime laws -- the proposed bill was shot down by Christian groups claiming that it would give "special rights" to gays -- the "special right" not to be beaten or killed, I suppose. Just as for years the rationale for banning the "Diary of Anne Frank," was that it treated all religions equally, and as we know, some people (in America, white straight middle class Christians) are more equal than others. Not a single minister in my town condemned the act from the pulpit; unlike the Baptist football player who had been injured in a car accident the year before, I received no official sympathy from the school. Those fine salt of the earth Christian Americans erased me into nothingness, for the crime of having been gay, having been beaten, and perhaps raising questions about what Christianity meant -- when "love thy neighbor" meant "attack and assault the different one." I made them uncomfortable, and so I paid.  
  
Ultimately, my leg did not have to be amputated. I walk with a limp, and likely will for the rest of my life, and my body is riddled with scars -- plastic surgery might reduce them, but insurance doesn't pay and I chose college instead -- but I am still one of the "lucky ones." I lived.   
  
While I was in the hospital, one of the rabbis came to see me quite often. He did not care that I was not Jewish -- I got the impression that he was angry at the chaplain for reasons beyond what had happened to me, and wanted to prove that he could comfort without trying to convert me. Most wonderfully, perhaps, he read to me for hours -- my arms and neck were hurt and I was too weak to read easily myself, and books had always been my solace. Among other things, it was he who put the Philip Pullman trilogy "His Dark Materials," into my hands; book three was not out then, but by the time it was, I had met the people who readied me for Pullman's challenges. I remain surprised that this book has not been attacked more; it is far more subversive than Harry Potter, which has no more to do with Wicca than it does with algebra. But had I not been influenced by certain people, I may have seen only the condemnation, and not the proffered solution within.   
  
And this book, with its laser-sharp focus on some of the flaws of organized Christianity, connects me to the next part of my tale. I now introduce two Christians who reaffirmed my world and reawakened my soul. Not by converting me -- I still feel far too unwelcome and unconvinced, and they forced nothing upon me. But by acknowledging -- embracing -- the dark corners of their faith and themselves, they brought blinding light into my shadowed world. 


	3. Chapter 2

Chapter 2  
Jeff and I were paired by a busy college registrar; two names on a list of incoming freshmen. Because of my handicap, I was permitted to arrive on campus a day early to adjust, so I was there already when Jeff came into our room. Brown hair, brown eyes, a warm and friendly smile -- I was still too frightened and awkward to come forward (let alone out!), until he began unpacking his books, which tempted me too much. He cheerfully showed them off to me, so I saw at once he had an obviously well-read Bible and several books on Christian history and theology, mixed in with several improbable companions -- the Portable Darwin and some battered copies of books by astronomer Carl Sagan and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould -- heroes of his, I was later to learn. We both had the complete "Lord of the Rings" trilogies in pre-movie cover editions, and I tried to focus on those, away from the Bible. We had also both been brought up on the Time Trilogy by Madeleine L'Engle for the moment, I tried to rely on that as common ground. He passed me a book called "Cosmicomics" by Italo Calvino -- fairy-tale type stories about how the world began. We laughed over our shared texts, traded others and so became friends though books,   
  
Much as I liked him, that Bible scared me then -- there was no telling when he might turn into one of those other people, trying to blot me out of existence. His gracious attempts to help me when I needed it (because of my weak leg and general frailty) were simply disconcerting. Learning to accept generosity can be almost as hard as learning to offer it unconditionally, I think.   
  
I felt my shoulders tighten when he mentioned casually that he would be getting up early the next morning to try a local church, and hoped he wouldn't wake me. He never tried to evangelize, or to make himself sound important, yet I was still scared. Even more so when he remarked, in response to someone else's question, that although he was planning to attempt a double major in physics or biology and religion, he imagined himself going to seminary ("I hate calling it 'divinity school,' he said sheepishly, "although everyone else does. It makes it sound like I'm studying to be divine.")   
  
Someone once asked him if he felt "called."   
"Well, sometimes I do. Sometimes I have doubts and I think -- I shouldn't do it then. It's one of those things, if you can imagine yourself doing anything else, you should do that. But then I think that maybe it's better that I have doubts. There's no danger of my mixing myself up with God." He laughed, then turned sober. "I do feel an obligation, and I think that could be a way for me to serve. And I need the time, to study more. I believe, I really believe, that God wants us to think and to challenge and explore, and I want to be part of that."  
  
Another time he quoted a sentiment I recognized from another Madeleine L'Engle book, "A Live Coal in the Sea." An odd, rambling soap opera of a book, but peopled with characters struggling with the legacies of religion -- the marriage between an agnostic astronomer and her minister husband, Mac, in a conservative southern town, haunted by the specter of a dark secret, inextricably connected to Mac's father's ministry. It had been one of the harder L'Engle books for me to get, as it includes references to homosexuality, sexual abuse and pathology and (horror!) female sexuality. L'Engle, for what it's worth, maintains an incredibly complex and rich Christian worldview; I always gave her that (although despite the overt nature of her texts, she has also been banned as "anti-Christian," for scientific ideas in the Time series and including "Jesus" in a list of great artists and philosophers -- apparently, it was degrading for him to be compared with Michaelangelo and Einstein).   
The title of the book in question, however, comes from one of the post-medieval religious texts she enjoys so much; the words of a certain William Langland, circa 1400.   
  
"But all the wickedness in the world that man might work or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal dropped into the sea."   
  
"I love it because for one thing, it's about the biggest image my mind can comprehend," he explained eagerly. I knew what he meant. The image exploded in my head in dazzling flashes -- the coal, dark and sparkling with menacing flashes of red that threatened to consume it, or split it into a dozen pieces, hurtling down from above. And below it, waves flowing to the horizon in each direction, gentle but inexorable. The splash, the hiss of steam as sizzling coal hit cool water, and then peace, as the waves swallowed the coal and began the eternal process of transforming it into something unrecognizable. "It's as close to infinity as I can imagine. But it's not just that." I looked up, torn from my reverie. "It makes it such a clear choice for me. To be part of the wickedness, or the mercy. And I love that the word he picked is mercy. That's what I believe in, mercy and compassion so huge we can't even comprehend it."  
  
"The Old Testament God didn't seem terribly merciful to me," I said, immediately regretting it. I couldn't afford this fight, and certainly not with someone who had treated me as, well, mercifully, as Jeff. "I mean, I don't know that much about it. . ."  
  
Yet he wasn't at all offended. "I know. I've tried to work my mind around that, too. Sometimes I wonder if maybe the lesson of Christ is that it changed God. Whether you call it the New Covenant, or just a change in tone and emphasis -- God the loving father, not the God who described Himself as jealous and showed Himself to be vengeful, over and over again. Or maybe that was what Jesus made us begin to understand -- it didn't have to be war, between us and God or between believers and non-believers. There didn't have to be a chosen people; you could choose. I mean, maybe God was always like that and before we were wrong, or maybe, to be clichŽ about it, Jesus changed him. You know, the old story about the self-centered man who can't get over the wonder of his own child." He laughed -- Jeff laughs a lot. "Maybe Jesus got out of bounds, forced his hand, and made His Father change the rules. It's been known to happen."  
  
Somewhat to my surprise, he wasn't terribly active in the religious groups on campus. He went to a few meetings and merely said they made him uncomfortable. Later I would understand why, but for the moment I was merely grateful to put as much space between Jeff the Christian, who still frightened me, and Jeff the Roommate and all-too-rapidly Jeff the Best Friend.   
  
And certainly, the way he talked about religion and Christianity was like no one else ever had, the conversation above being just one example. He said, half-jokingly (but only half) that he might write his religion thesis on why American Christians were still so obsessed with sex. "It just gets worse," he said. "Those big promise ring ceremonies, where everyone vows virginity to each other, for one thing. Or if you try to find information about so-called "Christian" parenting on the Internet, what you get is site after site arguing about how to spank teenage girls, because that's absolutely essential to Christianity!"   
  
He knew practically every episode of "The Simpsons" by heart, and insisted that the show was the most important bit of religious discourse in America today. "No other show deals with religion, or morality, with that kind of complexity. What other show would do an episode about how to interpret the 8th Commandment in relation to stealing cable?" He also insisted that said show had better family values than almost anything else on TV. "There's so much love there -- resisting temptation to adultery, the way the family allows Lisa, in all her brilliance, to speak on her own, the way they forgive Bart, the relationship between Lisa and Homer especially-- it's all brilliant."   
  
He said that he disliked most of the Christian youth movement in America (the music, the t-shirts, the "Left Behind" books) -- he felt it was condescending and narrow-minded, and more to the point, boring. He also said it seemed to him to be motivated by fear --- "As if listening to non-Christian music, or reading non-Christian books, will steal your faith away. If your faith is so weak to require isolation, than it isn't worthy of the name." Luckily for me, he wanted no part in the "WWJD" phenomenon (those letters do still send little chills up my back) -- "I don't think He would pay $29.95 for a shirt," he said brightly. "And look -- it's not even 100% cotton. It's an anti-Leviticus shirt!" That was sort of a favorite of his -- "Resisting sexual tempation may be one thing, but show me the American who can resist a cotton/poly blend. The point being not that such blends are evil, but that laws come out of historical context." This, I believe, was his way of working up to the fact that the condemnation of homosexuals wasn't part of his operating system.   
  
When I did, stumblingly, come out to him, he smiled that same reassuring smile and said that he was glad I trusted him. I waited, still expecting (although I should have known better), a "hate the sin, love the sinner," slap on the wrist, but none came. Later, when pressed, he admitted to me that he had thought I might be gay for awhile, and it certainly never bothered him. "Why should it?" he asked, unironically.  
  
When I pointed out that some Christians didn't take too kindly to it, he sighed. "Yes. It's hard, sometimes, trying to prove to people that there isn't anyone I hate, or anyone I think God has summarily cast aside. Not as hard as -- I mean, I'm the lucky American majority -- white, male, Protestant, straight. But I still feel like I have something to defend. I can't stand the idea of God being like the DMV -- casting people into hell for not filling out the right paperwork. And so many people have turned Christianity into everything wrong -- a weapon of hate and judgment, when we are being told over and over again to love."  
  
That was the same night I told him about what had happened to me, and it finally happened -- he couldn't smile or joke his way through it.. He was outraged, hurt, mortified, on my behalf and on humanity's behalf. "God have mercy on us all," I heard him murmur.   
  
"You think that?" I snapped, more bitterly than I meant to.  
  
He visibly worked to calm himself. "I have to," he said finally. "I really do believe in a God of tremendous love and compassion -- beyond all imagining. And my obligation, if I believe in that, is to try to show that, and act like that, all the time -- to try to embody just a tiny bit that kind of mercy, and not buy into hatred and isolationism." He stared into space, then down at his hands. "How could anyone do that?" he said to himself again. "What kind of God. . ."?  
  
And in sharing in my own suffering, despite my being supposedly despicable in two ways (being gay and non-Christian), he was making a place for me. 


	4. Chapter 3

Note: Marcus Borg's writings can be found online at Beliefnet; the Lewis story mentioned is "The Great Divorce." Obviously, neither are mine.  
  
Chapter 3  
  
The third character in my small story came into our lives in the late autumn, a redhead named Camilla. She and Jeff became friends first, seeking out a church that fit them, and she often came into our room to talk. In a way, they became each other's fellowship -- they had found a Sunday church,, requiring a train ride into the city, and Camilla also offered a Taise service at a local church they had found too blah, somehow, for Sundays. Taise, as I understand, is a service of chanting created by monks in France. No sermon -- just an hour of singing and thinking about the words. I went to a few of those services -- they were tagged as "healing" services (Camilla is chronically ill; we don't speak of it much, but sometimes I think it's central to who she is. In the brilliant mystery novel "The Daughter of Time" by Josephine Tey, a doctor, looking at a portrait of poor libeled Richard III, remarks on a unique expression victims of childhood illness or injury acquire -- the affect of suffering at too young an age. Having read this, I can't help but see this in Camilla -- a certain refinement of her brow and eyes, and a bit of distance in her smile), and I enjoyed the experience. Partly because I wasn't being demanded to act, just to sing, and there were no words that seemed meant to root me out. The idea of God is still so vague to me, but I felt that a little piece if God might be in those most simple strains, and especially, that God came through Jeff and maybe Camilla, who gently squeezed my hand. In the quiet, with Camilla on my right and Jeff on my left, I felt safe, and yet unsure as to what would happen next. Was this the night of evangelism, now?  
  
No, it was the night of 1000 debates and critiques of the world as Camilla and Jeff worked out their Christianity in front of each other, testing each other out. Together, they were fiery, witty, incredibly fast-paced. Walking around campus was hard on my leg, and I was usually exhausted by nightfall. Most people gain weight their first semester; I lost weight because some nights I was just too exhausted to go to dinner, and even though Jeff faithfully brought food back, living on Cheerios does slim a person down. So often at first I was on the fringes of the flying birdies back and forth between Camilla and Jeff. I would lie on my bed, a blanket over my legs and just listen to them.   
  
And frankly, I found Camilla somewhat intimidating at first. So passionate, so well-read, with an unflagging memory and an equally unfailing series of retorts, responses and anecdotes. Those first few weeks she usually sat on the floor, or in Jeff's chair, or on his bed, giving me the space she sensed I needed. One night, when Jeff was (as is his wont) writing a paper by sitting in the exact center of eight opened books and six sheets of notes, Camilla came by and he started to clear a space.  
  
"It's okay," I said. "You can sit there," pointing to the end of the bed. I wasn't completely confident -- Jeff is a fairly physical person, he hugs or touches your hand or shoulder or back for reassurance, whereas Camilla and I were more physically reserved. Other than that moment of hand-holding, Camilla had not touched me at that poitn. I wasn't completely sure why -- squeamishness about my injury, or what had led to it, possibly. But I was beginning to trust her, and I needed to try, if only not to lose Jeff to her.   
  
"Are you sure?" she asked cautiously. I nodded.  
  
"Okay," she said and carefully eased herself onto the end of the bed, hugging one of the spare pillows. "You will tell me if I hurt you though? I mean, jostle your leg?"  
  
"Oh," I said. That was all. "No, it's fine."  
  
She smiled sheepishly. "I just wanted to be sure."   
  
And from that moment on, I could not fear her. She still held me in thrall sometimes, but it was only out of respect and admiration and shock at being so close to such a person.  
  
Camilla was, I learned quickly, fervently political, and unlike many Americans, had no shame about being so. In fact, this was central to her spiritual life. For her, Christianity was inextricably linked with concern about social justice, a passionate desire to shield and aid. Whatever her views on the next world, her work in this world was plain, and an unambiguous duty to the God she clearly loved.   
  
She could recite the UN Declaration of Human Rights by heart, a product of years of devoted work for Amnesty International. She regularly wrote her senators and representative urging them which way to vote on legislation. She worked with a group lobbying for better health care for the underprivileged, especially prenatal care, and often lamented the fact that American health care was so reduced to money, "as if my father's law degree makes me more worthy of medical treatment than the daughter of a drug dealer. Neither of us have anything to do with it." To her, it seemed like an unforgivable travesty of Americans that, despite our riches, we had only the 26th (or so) lowest infant mortality rate in the world, meaning mothers in far poorer counties were less likely to lost their infants to death. Likewise, she was unwilling to ignore the fact that the "evil island" of Cuba had higher literacy and immunization rates than America. She wasn't a "real" socialist (although she had Fabian sympathies) but she had no moral pretensions regarding capitalism, either. "Neither works in isolation. Sure, Marxism has never been put into complete practice, and we certainly don't practice Adam Smith capitalism now. Invisible hand, indeed."  
  
She also worked feverishly on a campaign to abolish the death penalty, for both pragmatic and religious reasons. "Vengeance isn't morality. Having greater compassion than our criminals -- should that be so hard? So much violence brought into a blood-soaked world." And then she would fling out the statistics of overturned convictions, racist trials, incompetent legal aid, giving it the momentum of a thriller where the case will be solved at the last possible minute, but never allowing the dramatic flair of her language to overshadow the idea that real lives were at stake.  
  
And that flair was real. Camilla could say things that sound stilted and affected when I record them, but in her voice and presence they were poetry. In another era she might have been a storyteller and even now she was a singer -- a rich mezzo-soprano, who used her songs as arguments and pleas. She was partial to folk and neo-folk music -- songs that, in her words, "opened up worlds of empathy." It was a constant irritation and mystery to her that the idea of the "protest song" had almost disappeared in America. To their mutual delight, she and Jeff had both been raised on Harry Chapin, a singer I had never heard of -- a tireless worker against world hunger, performing hundreds of concerts for free and posthumously receiving a Congressional Medal for his efforts, after a too-young death in a car crash. You may know him as the author of "Cat's in the Cradle," but Jeff and Camilla were far more moved by his songs about America in the 1970s -- he shared their conflicts about this nation, with so many idealistic promises and so many (as they saw them) social and moral failures. Jeff was partial to a song called "A Quiet Little Love Affair," which dealt with the moral struggle of continuing to love a country (or an idea) despite recognition of its flaws -- for Jeff, the struggle between loyalty and love was always complicated. Too intelligent to love without question, yet too merciful not to want to yield to an ideal of unconditional love and forgiveness.   
  
" Oh, time went by and I forgot,  
Why I fell in love,  
Though I still pledge my allegiance,  
And soon I would wave the flag above,  
Didn't know why what we'd done,  
Didn't know where it flowed,  
Well I never knew if we had lost,  
If we had grown,  
It was the last of a little love affair,  
Between my country and me,  
(back ground: Oh say can you see, my country tis of thee)  
Oh, oh, my country tis of thee."  
  
For Camilla, an even more stirring song (from the same album, "The Last Protest Singer," which Jeff teased Camilla about being) was "Sounds Like America to Me."   
  
"Insecurity can beat me darling   
but sometimes that's where I'm at   
so I hope that you can keep me darling   
so at least I can count on that   
you see some things stir me deeply   
though I try to hide from pain   
but wide awake or sleepy   
some questions still remain   
sometimes these days it's hard to choose   
the one right road to go   
but this then is all I'm sure I know...   
I know when a child is hurting   
that the silence can be wrong   
I know when old folks are helpless   
I can't just pass along   
and I know when someone's hungry   
I can't just sing this song   
and when I hear somebody crying   
I can't just wonder who that it could be   
well I hear somebody crying now   
and it sure sounds like America to me. . ."  
  
The chorus described her so perfectly -- for Camilla, to know of the evil in the world meant one was obligated to fight it, every day, every way, replace it in every form with love, charity or hope. Furthermore, as a person living on the planet, one had an obligation to acknowledge that evil, regardless of how far away it might seem. Ignorance, willful ignorance -- whether manifested in lies, or a refusal to learn -- was in her mind, perhaps the greatest sin. If God's love was infinite, so was humanity's responsibility.   
Even worse for her was the knowledge -- and her unflinching acceptance -- of evil done under the auspices of good. Evil was omnipresent, in crimes of omission and inaction as well as complicit choice, and to be silent was to be part of the evil. Camilla may not have agreed with Dante's concept of hell and who goes there, but the idea that "the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality" rang true for her, and seemed particularly damning to Christians content to rest on their laurels, or more precisely, Christ's laurels.   
  
Camilla, like Jeff, was torn between too many courses of study, struggling to determine her calling, settling finally on comparative literature and history, learning Greek and eventually Arabic on the side. They both read constantly out of class and were full of news and new ideas, which alternately thrilled them and devastated them. Camilla in particular could suffer from world events. As Jeff once said, "She never learned that anyone wasn't her neighbor," and she loved them all, with a recklessness my reserve couldn't quite understand. No one's suffering was unimportant to her; she seemed to be missing some ability to detach herself, protect herself. She entered the pain willingly, if there seemed to be anything she could do Particularly in the next year of our acquaintance, I would learn this by heart as well as by rote -- from the day of September 11th on, she could not stop worrying about the people who were supposed to be her "enemies" as well as her neighbors; was she not commanded to love them both? She read international news, and learned about many things that were not discussed in America, and her heart ached for Taliban soldiers reported slaughtered in reckless violation of international law; she could not be contented with reports of "minor" casualties knowing that only meant Americans. This is not to imply, as certain foolish people with a limited capacity for love seem to think, that she did not ache for the victims here as well.   
  
But at this point in the story we were all more innocent, and there was more joy and idealism, and less angst in their dialogues than in the next year. They both felt an obligation as Christians to be politically aware, passionately active and responsible citizens of the world. They also felt, I discovered, as unwelcome as I sometimes did. "I'm always being told I'm not a "real" Christian," Camilla said sadly. "Because of the other things I believe."  
  
"Are they in, er, conflict?" I asked, confused.  
  
She shook her head. "I don't think so. I feel like Jesus would want me to help feed the hungry, or protect innocents on death row (or really, anyone -- I think it's incredibly arrogant to impose permanent judgment, and that humanity is just too flawed), or to try to help prisoners of conscience -- political, religious, and everything. But now, what I do is wrong, or if it's right it doesn't matter, because I consider the Bible a human and flawed document, or believe in gay marriage, or because I'm pro-choice. Not pro-abortion, but pro-choice." She smiled, thinly. "It's hard to say, especially without talking about Heaven and Hell, but more and more, and the more "real" Christians I meet, I think I'll take my chances on this earth, and try everyday to do right, and to make my faith lively and evolving, not flat and still, And if I still miss the cut-off, then at least I'll have gotten this life.  
"And I try to avoid getting into the debate about "real Christians." Personally, I think it's reprehensible for someone to say that no Christian ever does anything bad -- the Crusades, the Inquistion, the massacres in Rwanda, the near obliteration of Native Americans, witchcraft trials -- by our affiliation, we need to take responsibility. Lots of those people believed that what they were doing was good and holy. How cheap for us now to say "the Devil made them do it!" But I try not to say who is a real Christian or not, because I can't know what's in their hearts. I do believe that Christianity is flawed anytime it allows hate and it still allows hate. Look at the main preachers in the Religious Right -- Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell constantly preach hatred and difference. But I don't know if they're false Christians, or just confused. And that isn't a judgment I can make. All I can do is try to own my beliefs, and show as well as say that Christianity can be something else."   
  
"However, I did completely lose it when I saw footage of Christians picketing at Matthew Shepard's funeral and later his trial," Jeff said more harshly than usual. "To me that was just so abhorrent, to intrude on a family in their grief in order to shame and attack their son whose voice was gone. No mention that murder is wrong, either. It was so horrible, I thought I might throw up. And I said, "Those are not Christians. They are not demonstrating love or compassion to their neighbors. They are selfish and arrogant, and I am ashamed to share my name with them."   
  
Camilla grinned. "You know I don't really believe in an interventionist God, who reaches down and gives some people cancer and cures it in others, or makes sure one team wins the Super Bowl, or punishes and rewards people, because if so, He's doing really sloppy work, and I prefer a competent God." I laughed and she continued. "But sometimes I do think that just about nineteen years ago, God looked down and saw that humanity was having a tough day, and got around to sending us Jeff."  
  
We talked about Heaven and Hell then, too. Camilla wasn't convinced she believed in hell -- "it just defies a loving God too much. Defies him, or makes him less than all-powerful and all-seeing. It's one thing for God to allow suffering on Earth -- I believe in free will, and I guess a Pattern -- if you go against the Pattern, you change the entire Pattern. Nothing is fixed and linear. And we are given that choice, and we have to choose over and over again, every day. We are charged with recreating the world, and I think it's part of God, for us to share in it like that. But to be complicit to that kind of suffering for all eternity -- I guess if it's true, I want no part of him." She paused. "There's a lovely Marcus Borg story about a Hindu professor in a seminary considering the passage about "the way, the truth and the light," and he says that yes, it's absolutely true -- the only way is to give yourself up unto death and a new spiritual birth. Jesus' story is universal."  
  
Jeff believed in hell only to the extent of hell being permanent separation from God, not fire and darkness and demons. "What's the point?" he asked briskly. "I think some Christians get off on it, practically -- chortling about hell and the people who go there. And I don't say "get off on it" likely; there's a definite satisfaction there. You don't get that kind of righteousness without that. It's no better than pornography in some ways -- this reckless joy in lurid detail. It either makes God look, well, petty and vengeful and capricious, or it makes him subservient to Satan, or Evil, or what you will. To have an omnipotent God, you would have to believe that He chooses to send people to hell. And I don't."  
  
"There's a remarkable C.S. Lewis story about a busload of people who travel between Heaven and Hell and most of the people in Hell want to stay there. It sort of opposes duality." Camilla remarked. "The separation idea does make sense, though. It's just the eternal punishment -- torture really -- that I can't accept. I don't want to be part of that."  
  
I was surprised to hear them argue about heaven, though. "I really don't like the idea of heaven as a perpetual cocktail party," Camilla said. "The answers in the back of the book, running around to meet people -- eh. It's so human."  
  
"I always liked the Virgil heaven," Jeff replied, having had to take Latin in high school. "Heaven is an extent of earthly joy."  
  
They asked me what I thought and I shrugged. I wasn't going there, right? But then I recalled an idea that had followed me. "The Madeleine L'Engle model. In Heaven we gain some new intelligence, as essential as sight. Before here, we lived someplace with no sight, and you can't explain vision to a tribe of blind people. I like that idea. Progress."  
  
"I do, too," said Camilla. "I always thought reincarnation made more sense than hell, in terms of Christianity."  
  
"God grant us time, that we may become better fitted for the next step," Jeff agreed. "I think it must take more than one life to learn to "forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."   
  
Camilla agreed. "It always seemed like a tricky promise to me. I try, but I have to believe God is more gracious than I am."   
  
And I thought to myself how strange it was how some people made God so less virtuous, more jealous and angry than flesh and blood people like these among them.  
  
"Love thy neighbor" was a literal creed they struggled with everyday. Jeff actually tithed his income from his on-campus jobs to different charities; Camilla was stretched thin running organizations and educationals on campus. She was a card-carrying member of Amnesty International and the ACLU; Jeff, I learned, turned in his Eagle Scout badge in protest of the Boy Scouts continued and concerted policy of excluding gays. They were both highly attuned to propoganda, and were not unable or unwilling to inflict their scorn on certain objects, especially faulty arguments.   
  
These included a rapid and varied assortment, much to my amusement at times. Nor were they always deadly serious, Camilla and Jeff insisting that no ideology or faith could survive if people lacked a sense of humor about themselves, as humor and perspective went hand in hand. And so the list was formed.   
  
The so-called "family values" show "7th Heaven.   
  
"Oh," Jeff cried, "but that's why I want to be a minister -- to stalk people, illegally obtain personal information about them and give empty advice with no follow through."   
  
Camilla added, "And don't forget to spy on your children and encourage your daughters to be vapid and boy-crazy and your sons to be arrogant and patriarchal."   
  
Jeff nodded and looked back at his reading, and then up again. "No, what's really worse about that show is that people just say "family values." A mom and a dad in the same house, so everything is perfect. Except that they lie and steal and stalk each other. I mean, in my family, trust was a "family value," and it's not like we all became drugged-out sex whores because my parents didn't drive around to make sure we did not have condoms."  
  
"Speaking of which, it irritates me when men on TV carry condoms in their wallets," said Camilla. "It's not really safe -- heat and friction, you run the risk of the rubber thinning and then you get holes. All right, PSA over."  
  
"Taken under advisement, Camilla."  
  
"And we musn't forget how it actually and legally crossed the line into abuse when Menopause-mad Annie sent the kids to live in the unfinished garage. Um, sorry, legally you have to provide for minor children. That was just scary."  
  
"And this season's ending is very gross," Jeff said. "The fake wedding -- all the lying -- yuck. If I were dumb enough to get married on a first date, I'd fess up so as not to drag my parents through all the rigamorale."  
  
"Or filing the wrong papers. I mean, it's fine to have a second ceremony, but be honest about it. And the conversion question -- the way it was shown -- was offensive, I thought. First off, converting to Judaism is hard, takes a long time and a lot of commitment. And lots of rabbis won't cooperate unless they feel someone is converting out of a true desire to do so. Which is kind of tangentially related is the idea that it is a really big thing for a lot of Jews to stay inside the faith, just because they were so close to being eliminated. My friend Eli says that he really does have to marry a Jewish woman, or at least one who would convert, because his family feels so strongly about it. They lost so many people -- in his grandad's generation, there were about 19 siblings, cousins, and so on between the ages of 10 and 22. And only two of them survived. There's still a lot of pressure to try to rebuild Judaism."  
  
"Wow," Jeff said with a sigh. "I just mean I hadn't thought about it like that -- that the pressure from the camps is still there and so present."  
  
Camilla nodded. "'The past isn't dead -- it's not even past.' William Faulkner. And one of the truest things I've ever read. That's why the past matters, and that's why we need to try to make peace with it.  
  
"Anyway, I forgot to say before about the "family values" thing -- what insults me is that it's such a narrow view of family values. I think that "Gilmore Girls" has great family values -- it's a family that really loves each other, despite generational differences and conflicts. But the way Rory is always happy to hang out with her grandparents, and talk to her grandfather about books -- I think that's a great value for teenage girls, that you can get encouragment and sustenance from your family for things other people might not value, especially for your intelligence. And at the same time, Lorelai the mom is still trying to make peace with her mother, even though a lot of people might just give up. I mean, why isn't that a "family values" show? Close, loving, trusting relationships, intergenerational relationships, a really good role model in Rory and by conduit, in Lorelai, who has parented a spectacular child under difficult circumstances, and who would do anything for her daughter. But no, because once Lorelai had evil unmarried sex. And nothing good ever comes of that."  
  
Jeff shrugged. "I still get annoyed when people slam "The Simpsons." Aside from being one of the smartest shows on TV, it tackles moral and religious themes all the time, episode where Krusty is reuinited with his father is just a study of Jewish culture, and the one where Homer becomes a "heretic" challenges traditional worship in a really American way. And then, in my favorite decision ever, the judge says that "science and religion must remain 500 feet apart at all times" in the "Angel-bones" episode."  
  
"Ah! With a Stephen Jay Gould cameo!"   
  
"Very good, Camilla -- I taped it, just for him."   
  
Camilla laughed. "Some of the Bible retellings are my favorites. Well, besides "Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others," and "No child has ever tangled with the Republican party and lived to tell about it." Homer eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge and blaming Marge, Lisa as the power behind Moses -- I liked that one. Almost as much as when Lisa creates Lutherans."  
  
Jeff chuckled as well. "And the thing is, even aside from all the religious motifs, it's an incredibly moral show, No, really!" he insisted (I must have looked skeptical). "Other than the language it uses sometimes (and that's a whole other argument, why we make a moral issue of language outside of context), there's a very sharp dichotomy between right and wrong, and usually that gets made really clear. There's three different episodes where Marge or Homer could be unfaithful, and they are tempted, but they stay true. Someone always comes to the aid of a suffering family member, and there's real love there. But just like everything else, people get hung up on one word or joke and they miss the whole message."  
  
Another target was conservative pundit Ann Coulter ("She flat out lies, and then tosses her long hair around. I have great hair, but you don't see me using it as an argument." "Camilla, you have much better hair than she does.") and the representatives of the Religious Right, who offended Jeff and Camilla far more than I would have imagined. "I feel so dirty -- the dirt's not coming off!" Jeff yelled, joking in tone but serious in sentiment after watching an interview with Jerry Falwell (not the infamous post 9/11 one; I forget the topic, other than homosexuality being evil. Isn't that always the topic?).   
  
The doctrine of "hate the sin, love the sinner," and the similar doctrine that Christians ("real" Christians) had no responsibility for the Crusades, or the Spanish Inquisition, or the Holocaust, or killing doctors who performed abortions, or hate crimes, were other idea they found particularly noxious.  
  
"The first is cheap sophistry, " Jeff said, "and merely away to avoid the question of when hate became doctrine, and the second is just shameless denial. We were there. We failed. Let us at least acknowledge that, so that we may do better in the future."   
  
To which Camilla (her voice nearly rubbed out with a cold) rather glumly said, "There has been more persecution in this century than any other in recorded history. At the height of the Islamic empire in Spain, in the eighth and ninth century, cities of Muslims, Christians and Jews flourished and poetry, art and science thrived. And then we beat it back and replaced it with the Crusades, and deny all responsibility today. Beautiful, lost al-Andalus!"   
  
Then she smiled, albeit weakly and said "Other Christians always seem to like to say they would die for their faith, Good for them. I want to live for my faith, protect it, enhance it, embrace it. But to do that, you have to take responsibility. I don't understand why a religion with so much humility in the text becomes so defensive in real life. Is it that Jesus died for our sins, so we don't have to do anything else? Somehow, I don't think that "faith by grace" meant that. It's just," she paused, "I'm sleepy and sick, so I hope this makes sense. I'm out of doctrine and just talking." We nodded for her to go on.  
  
"Okay, so Christians are willing to die for their religion. But it's easy to die for something, Living for a cause, keeping it wrapped round your heart, that's what's hard. And it floors me that Christians don't feel a need to examine our past. We did collaborate in a way with Hitler. Our faith was what started the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. We destroyed local culture in the Americas because it wasn't Christian. And, oh, so many things. People killed in Rwanda, in churches where the Pastors promised they would be safe. Refusing to take a stance on the murder of Matthew Shepard." She sighed. "That's one of my moments of failing, though, when I watched the protestors on TV" -- Jeff sharply drew in his breath; this had hit him as well, as I knew.  
  
"Failing?" I asked.  
  
She nods, eyes down. "I mean in that I sputtered and wept and said 'Those are not true Christians!' Like Jeff. It's just that I try really hard not to say that. People tell me I'm not a Christian all the time, because I don't take the Bible as literal truth, or because I'm a feminist, or because I oppose the death penalty or the ACLU and I oppose school prayer and -- eh. I try not to let it get to me -- after all, I know my relationship with God and with Jesus, they don't. It's here." She touched her heart.  
  
"Like a secret garden and the walls were very high," I said, misquoting "The Princess Bride."  
  
She smiled. "Not high enough, sometimes. But because of that, I try not to say this IS Christianity and you're doing it WRONG."  
  
"Yeah, well, there's absolutely no Christian defense for protesting at a funeral," muttered Jeff. "That just offended me -- I wanted to cry, That was so callous, so unfeeling, so anti-love, so arrogant. . ."  
  
"I guess what I'm saying is I don't want to judge people's souls. But I want to be able to say -- this, what I'm saying, is as Christian as what you say, And if Jesus really died for us on the cross, than I feel obligated to take responsibility for my faith. It's just a lie to say that Christians didn't do anything bad. I've read the journals kept by Inquisitors, and a lot of them sincerely believed that they were doing God's work. Whether Christians were directly involved, or just did nothing to stop it (like the Holocaust -- although the ordinary Germans running the camps were Christian, weren't they?). It's just, how can anyone take us seriously when we say "oh, that wasn't us." For whatever reason, Christians do bad things. It's a lie and a disservice to suggest otherwise. And then, back to Jesus -- he died, he sacrificed himself because he was innocent. Right? And now, when we aren't innocent, we deny, back away, dissemble. I think that to emulate Christ we do need to have a sense of responsibility. Not always guilt, not always complete abjectness, but still. We are the ones left to carry out the ministry. In love or in hate, in dialogue or in monologue, in exploration or in stasis." 


	5. Chapter 4

Note: Chick tracts CERTAINLY are not mine: find them at http://www.chick.com. The ones we discussed were "Big Daddy," "The Little Princess" "Reverend Wonderful," and "Flight 114", but the others are just as bad.  
  
Chapter 4  
  
Chick tracts, which luckily enough I had never encountered on my own, were a source of both horror, embarrassment and a little bit of amusement to them. "George Lucas should have co-opted the title "The Death Cookie." I will never get over that one," Jeff said. Other than that, they efficiently, if not quite viciously, ripped apart the arguments while reflecting on the ones they had seen before.   
  
"Bah! All these science ones are just full of misstatements. And he only cites one main source, someone who publishes books with him. Very reliable. But obviously you can make evolution look dumb if you describe something else. No one believes the idiot theory he made up here. And for the millionth time, no one said we were directly descended from monkeys, or replaced monkeys. We branched off, which is very different. And argh! Total mistake about the structure of atoms. Or else just bad writing, but it implies that atoms don't exist because the protons in the nucleus would repel and explode."  
  
"I thought electrons were negative -- doesn't that make attraction? And hold them in place"  
  
"I'm not sure what this is supposed to prove (other than the fact that unlike you, these people don't understand atom theory). Unless they really want us to believe that God and Jesus hold every atom in place somehow and that somehow defies evolution. It's one thing to make the professor a hate-monger, but you could get a less ignorant shill to play the student."  
  
Although Jeff is primarily a physicist, Creation Science doctrines were hugely aggravating to him. "The worst part is that they have to lie," he said irritably, removing from one of his files (Jeff and Camilla both kept vast amounts of reading material and articles of interest at hand) a copy of the disclaimer that was to be pasted in Alabama biology textbooks.   
  
"Indulge me?"  
  
"Do I ever object to seeing poor phrasing laid to waste?" Camilla asked. "Remember, I e-mailed that software company to complain about using "compliment" when they met "complement."  
  
I shrugged. "You know how well I understand science, anyway."  
  
He read it off, cutting his words off crisp and clear.  
  
" This textbook discusses evolution, a controversial theory some scientists present as a scientific explanation for the origin of living things, such as plants, animals and humans.   
No one was present when life first appeared on earth. Therefore, any statement about life's origins should be considered as theory, not fact.   
The word "evolution" may refer to many types of change. Evolution describes changes that occur within a species. (White moths, for example, may "evolve" into gray moths.) This process is microevolution, which can be observed and described as fact. Evolution may also refer to the change of one living thing to another, such as reptiles into birds. This process, called macroevolution, has never been observed and should be considered a theory. Evolution also refers to the unproven belief that random, undirected forces produced a world of living things.   
There are many unanswered questions about the origin of life which are not mentioned in your textbooks, including:   
*Why did the major groups of animals suddenly appear in the fossil record (known as the Cambrian Explosion)?   
*Why have no new major groups of living things appeared in the fossil record in a long time?   
*Why do major groups of plants and animals have no transitional forms in the fossil record?   
*How did you and all living things come to possess such a complete and complex set of "instructions" for building a living body?   
Study hard and keep an open mind. Someday you may contribute to the theories of how living things appeared on earth."  
  
"First," he said, counting on his fingers, "they misstate what a scientific theory means. It doesn't just mean that someone believes something. It's a fairly specific organization of natural phenomena. But more insidiously, that implies that the only science we can understand is what is directly observable, and that's just not true. The point of science is to hypothesize from what's directly observable. Second, they do a very poor job explaining microevolution and macroevolution,. It creates a false dichotomy between them when they're linked and involve numerous processes -- genetic drift, speciation, et cetera. Third -- this is most irritating -- is it implies that evolution is random, which is patently false. It just doesn't make sense to read "evolution -- natural selection -- adaptation -- what have you" and come up with "random." Almost nothing is less random, and they'll probably contradict themselves later with thermodynamics, anyway."  
  
"Thermodynamics is, ah, entropy?" I asked.  
  
He nodded. "Yes. One of the critiques creation scientists make -- although interestingly it's not here, I see -- of evolution is that it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which basically defines entropy and says that all systems run to chaos; therefore, evolution doesn't make sense, because evolution gets less chaotic, or things run more efficiently. But it's inaccurate, because a system as a whole can run to entropy while a specific area seems to become less chaotic. It's the overall balance that counts, and there's so much energy from the sun, it doesn't quite apply here. But they just ran off with the word "random" from "random mutation," which is part of the process, not the process itself. Once a random mutation has occurred, what happens is anything but random. But more devious is the way they use "undirected." Either that implies a supernatural force, or it's wrong. Self-directed doesn't mean undirected. And it's not scientific language -- any proper scientist using a word that vague would properly get tossed out on his ear. And it very nastily implies that believing in evolution is incompatible with religious faith, which would come as a great surprise to many scientists, I'm sure. Since many evolutionists aren't atheists. Well, except to people who think they get to decide if you believe in God or not."  
  
"Actually, Jeff, I was thinking about that -- well, not exactly -- before. Have you ever felt, say, unwelcomed or anything because you were a Christian in a scientific setting? I mean, I know so many Christians who are science majors or pre-med it seems silly that you would be, but are you?"  
  
"Nah. Certainly not by anyone in an authority position. But then I make it very clear that in the lab, we talk science. That's the language, and it's no more fair bringing the Bible into it than it would be, say, "Alice in Wonderland." Actually, the latter would be better -- lots of sophisticated math. But I've never met a scientist who seemed troubled that I believed in God. Still, the Bible isn't useful as a scientific tool, and I don't think it was intended to be.  
"But back to actual facts. That bit about the fossil explosion in the Cambrian Era. For one thing, it's very suspicious that they have to use a non-scientific term like "major groups" instead of something like phyla. And I consider mammals to be a fairly major group, yes? But they didn't appear until the Triassic Era (that's about 300 million years later, but don't quote me on that -- it's not my strong point.). And birds, reptiles, insects and amphibians didn't "suddenly appear" then, either. And that's all aside from the fact that multicellar life forms appeared in the Ediacaran Era, which is something like 100 million years before the Cambrian. I suppose creation scientists can throw all those out, if they use the "young Earth" flood-dating theories, but then they shouldn't misstate them like that. Not quite cricket. The next argument is just as bad, since it doesn't define time in a meaningful way. I mean, yes, you could complain that nothing new has occurred in 300 years, but flowering plants have only been around since the -- oh, the Cretaceous? 100, 125 million years ago. That's nothing in geologic time -- about 3% of the Earth's lifespan. And argh! I loathe the transitional fossil argument. There are lots of transitional fossils, except that when they get identified, they're moved into the overall schematic. That's what science does -- it takes new evidence and refines. If you start with a complete thesis -- like the Biblical story of creation -- and won't refine it, evidence is meaningless, and they treat it like that. If it doesn't fit, they throw it out. They won't be happy unless someone comes up with a half bird/half reptile, because they aren't interested in what they theory actually means.   
  
"In fact," he concluded, "the only thing I can't argue with is the touching admonition that students study hard and keep an open mind. Much luck may they have, if that's the level of communication with which they're being taught. But really. More than half of the scientific statements there are wrong. That's no way to win an argument. It is, however, a brilliant way to look stupid. Just like that lie about Darwin recanting on his deathbed -- never happened, his daughter and family denied it. The woman who said it hadn't even been there. And you want stupid, how about the centuries it took for the Church to accept Galileo and the heliocentric universe. Centuries."  
  
Jeff rolled his eyes through the rest of the "science" tracts, and then started skimming through the others, making an annoyed MST3K style commentary all the while.  
  
"Someone handed me the one about the girl dying of some unnamed disease once, when my friend was really sick. And I was just so mad. I mean, Chris was this beautiful, serene, musician. He made his peace with losing a finger and even learned to play around it, and it still wasn't enough," Camilla said softly. "Anyway, the person who gave it to me saw I looked upset and got up in my face, asking "Are you saved? Is someone sick? Are they saved? If you don't help them get saved, they'll go to Hell because of you."  
  
"How old were you!" Jeff demanded.  
  
"Nine. It was just so awful to deal with right then. All we knew is that we didn't know, we were hoping and praying for his suffering to end -- he was in so much pain," her voice broke for a second and she placed her head in her hands for a moment. Jeff gently rubbed her back.   
  
"Anyway, a very nice guy -- who turned out to be Jewish, for what it's worth, got airport security to make them leave me alone. They started yelling about being persecuted, but people seemed less interested in that when they saw me with my bag of gifts for Chris in one hand and my little purple backpack, crying in the middle of the terminal." Her voice was becoming more steady. "Then once while I had a letter writing campaign table set up, someone gave me the "Reverend Wonderful" tract -- about how I was going to Hell for trying to apply Christianity to social justice. This is very nasty -- personally, I don't think it was supposed to be "saved by grace" OR "saved by good works." If you received grace, you would want to do good works, and doing good works prepares you to better receive grace. But it makes it sound like trying to do good things is un-Christian. And again, it's totally arbitrary, It's never explained why the Reverend didn't "accept" the Savior -- since he said he prays in God's name. He didn't say the exact combination of words, or something. Just like that other nasty one, where the missionaries go to Hell. And somehow it makes God look good that He "doesn't know" the people who were working in His name. There's this nasty idea that it's wrong to do good works, because Jesus already did them all, and if you try to, than obviously your aren't saved by grace because you haven't accepted that. It just doesn't make sense, and it just doesn't fit the rest of the doctrine of service and love." 


	6. Chapter 5

Note: Tony Kushner's prayer is excerpted; you can find it in the book "Thinking about the Longstanding Promises of Virtue and Excellence."  
  
Chapter 5  
  
Because we were teenagers living together, it seems inevitable that we would have talked and joked about sex -- the mysterious world none of us had been initiated into, or seemed likely to in the near future. Although both Jeff and Camilla dismissed the claim that premarital sex was a particularly horrific indicator of social breakdown and insisted that it was not really a central tenet in "how to be Christian," neither of them sought out sex with the intensity of many of our classmates. Camilla insisted that she merely wasn't yet much interested. "I can watch "Shakespeare in Love," or anything with Tobey Maguire, and have a super crush for a little bit, then I go read a book. It all works out in the end. And really, having a boyfriend would probably be more trouble than it's worth to me right now, and when I do that, I like to do it right. I like to be a good girlfriend."  
  
"And you wouldn't be. . .because?" I asked. Frankly, if I could walk on that side of the white picket fence, I'd probably be in love with Camilla.  
  
She shrugged. "Too busy, too distracted, too often sick. I'd be all, "fine, I kissed you, go away now, I want to read." She grinned at Jeff. "Jeff, on the other hand, is probably an excellent boyfriend."  
  
Now he shrugged. "Not now I wouldn't be. Although it would be. . .nice, to be connected with someone like that."  
  
It occurred to me to wonder if Jeff and Camilla didn't date (each other or much of anyone else, and not always for lack of opportunity) as a way of avoiding a practical application of the sex precepts. I figured I was in no position to have sex anytime soon anyway -- I still couldn't handle the idea of kissing a boy. I expected them to laugh it off or refuse to answer, but they looked at each other thoughtfully.  
  
"I don't think that it's just temptation," Jeff said. "Like Camilla said, I want to be good in a relationship with someone. I want to have something to give. Maybe I'm spoiled because my parents really do still seem to be completely in love with each other, but I believe you can get that, and I'm willing to wait for it."  
  
"To me," said Camilla, "problems with sex come from people being dishonest with each other, which can happen in marriage or outside. I think that, for me, since I'm not running overboard with temptation, anyway that I want to seize the luxury of waiting, of really knowing the person before, well --"  
  
"Knowing the person," Jeff chimed in. "But I think it's worse when people marry under false pretenses to avoid premarital sex. I do know people who got married at 17 or 18 just to be able to sleep together, and they're mostly miserable now. I think it would have been less of an offense to God had they slept together outside of marriage than invoking a covenant in his name. That's the other thing that bugs me about "7th Heaven." All those feverish making out scenes, and everyone getting engaged when they get out of high school, and that brilliant "let's get married on the first date so we can have sex" sentiment. Because see, that made it holy. Or something. I think that the injunctions about sex are mostly about God being in the meaning, not the method or the details. Make associations and partnerships based on love and trust, not on sexual attraction that can fade or change. I think a thoughtless marriage is a lot worse than a thoughtless one-night stand."  
  
"But still, you're both going to wait for marriage?"  
  
They shrugged, almost simultaneously. "Maybe -- I just don't think that's what's going to matter the most in the end."  
  
"This sounds very New Age idealist," said Camilla, "but to me, what really matters is love. It's just so amazing, the idea that you can find a person and love him or her that much, be committed and love being committed. The odds against finding the right person are astronomical, and so many people do. And that love is so very, very right and good, just adding to all the love in the world, that it doesn't matter who you're with, or when you're with them, or how you're with them. Making the choice to love every day is what counts."   
  
I was surprised, actually, by how much gay rights mattered to them, both straight, both lacking any immediate gay relatives. Their denomination had begun ordaining gay clergy, much to their delight, and Camilla's church was -- no small thanks to her, I'm sure -- "Open and Affirming," whereas Jeff was pushing for this at home. Gay marriage became another topic under discussion; they insisted it was most unfair to claim that homosexual sex was wrong because it was extramarital and then deny such marriages.   
  
Camilla was particularly offended by the notion that marriage and sex were only about procreation, and thus off-limits to gays. "Someone better label me, too," she said with scathing bitterness. "God-fearing Christian boys, avoid this girl. She has offended your God, although not hers, by being outspoken and feminist and argumentative and inclusive, and thus perhaps you believe He has made her barren. Obviously, she does not deserve marriage." Noting our confusion, she rather vaguely said that she had been told it would be virtually impossible for her to conceive, for various "girlish reasons." Jeff, with his own unbound sympathy, put his hand on hers and she looked back rather sadly. Yet I think I knew more how she felt. Jeff, for all his compassion for the less fortunate, has always been fortunate, in the center, surrounded by options. I imagined that for a women, being cut off from the ideal of motherhood -- which so often defines women in our culture -- must be very isolating and frightening, in the same sort of way I felt. She was unable to take the place of a "real woman," and I would not be accepted as a "real man."  
  
We switched off to genetics then, Jeff grumbling about the people who didn't understand genetics or heredity were offering up religious arguments about them. "The religious right would be so happy for their not to be a gay gene," he said. "Aside from the fact that our inability to find something isn't scientific proof it doesn't exist (disproving is very hard), it just isn't how genetics work. No one is saying there's an on/off switch gene. And genes completely are effected by environment; it's virtually untestable, even with identical twins. A genetic predisposition usually leads someone to create an environment that suits him or her. And even factors we know are hereditary aren't guarantees -- height is considered a very high heritability factor, and it still only accounts for .5 or .6 probability in height."  
  
"So, do you believe in a gay gene?" I asked. I wasn't sure what it would mean if he did, actually. That's why it wasn't a sin, I was programmed incorrectly?  
  
"I think that there is probably some kind of genetic link or predisposition. Or other physical difference we don't understand, a different ratio of hormones or something. Variation in brain structure, perhaps But it would be a question of association and correlation, not a direct causation. But it's fallacious to say that "there isn't a gene for it, ergo, it is a choice." He paused. "Besides, I'm not sure it would be a helpful or useful proof. Other than labeling people and forcing distinction. Have you ever seen the movie "Twilight of the Golds"?  
  
I shook my head. Camilla shuttered and tersely recapped the plot -- a young woman is pregnant, only to discover her unborn child has a genetic anomoly that has just been linked with homosexuality. Her husband wants to abort the pregnancy, her gay brother is horrified by the implied sentiments that it might have been better for anyone had he not been born. "That scared me. Even more than the concept of designer children already did. But, oh, that was scary. Especially since they really didn't know."  
  
This is not to say they were unwilling to take this with a sense of humor, as well. Quite memorably, at dinner, Camilla noted with irritation an article she had read implying the old saw, that AIDS was a punishment for homosexuality. "To which I always want to say, God must really like lesbians then, since they have the lowest infection rate."  
  
Jeff smirked. "Well, perhaps that would give more evidence to the argument of God being a male entity."  
  
There was a moment of confusion. "Like, men are more vengeful? Meaner? Less nurturing?" someone asked.  
  
"Oh, I didn't mean anything that philosophical," he said in surprise.  
  
Camilla laughed. "Jeff. Did you really just mean to imply that, like most men, God isn't averse to some girl-on-girl action?"   
  
He smirked more, and she poked him with her fork. Then she rolled her eyes at me, and I couldn't help laughing either.  
  
However, they weren't willing to reduce homosexuality to one big punchline, either -- the Will and Grace solution. When I told Camilla what had happened to me, she kissed her finger and gently touched my forehead with it while she found words. They stuck in my mind ever after.  
  
"I wish I could make the world safe for you," she said sincerely, her eyes big with pain.  
  
I swallowed hard. Love. And mercy. Bound up in an incorrigible redheaded girl, whose own body fought against her, and who never gave up, never gave in.  
  
"You, too," was all I could say in response.  
  
Later I would hear Jeff read aloud Tony Kushner's devastating, furious National AIDS Remembrance Day prayer. Jeff has both the voice and the physical presence to give sermons, and this had been well honed by years of school plays and debate meets. However, even I was taken aback by this reading. Camilla, of course, had read it before; along with Kushner's equally incensed piece in response to Matthew Shepard's murder, and she said later that she was startled at how much the words, in Jeff's ringing voice, undid her again. It was raining here that day, and she and I were sharing an umbrella, while other students -- even some who had just been passing through -- stopped to hear Jeff raging at God. It worked, I suppose, because he believed it -- you have to have a certain kind of strength to rage at God like that, and in a way, a certain kind of love for God. The kind of anger that burns out of betrayal can't exist in a void.   
  
He began with the calm, warm confidence of an ordinary prayer, his voice smooth and clear.   
  
"Dearly beloved, let us pray.   
God:   
A cure would be nice. Rid those infected by this insatiable unappeasable murder of its lethal presence. Reconstitute the shattered, restore to health all those whose bodies, beleaguered, have betrayed them, whose defenses have permitted entrance to illnesses formerly at home only in cattle, in swine and in birds. Return to the cattle, the swine, and the birds the intestinal parasite, the invader of lungs, the eye-blinder, the brain-devourer, the detacher of retinas. Rid even the cattle and birds of these terrors; heal the whole world. Now. Now. Now. Now."   
  
With each "now" his voice rose, no longer cheerfully polite but resistant and demanding.   
  
Grant us an end that is not fatal: Protect: the injection drug user, the baby with AIDS, the sex worker, the woman whose lover was infected, the gay man whose lover was infected; protect the infected lover, protect the casual contact, the one-night stand, the pick-up, the put-down, protect the fools who don't protect themselves, who don't protect others: YOU protect them. The misguided, too and the misinformed, the ambivalent about living, show them life, not death; the kid who thinks that immortality is part of the luminous glory of sex. Who didn't believe this, once, discovering sex? Everyone did. Protect this kid, let this kid learn otherwise, and live past the learning; protect all kids, make them wiser but, until wise, make them immortal.   
Enlighten the unenlightened: The Pope, the cardinals, archbishops and priests, even John O'Connor, teach him how Christ's kindness worked: remind him, he's forgotten. Make them all remember, replace the ice-water in their veins with the blood of Christ, let it pound in their temples: the insurance executive as well as the priest, the congressional representative, the Justice and the judge, the pharmaceutical profiteer, the doctor, the cop, the anchorwoman and the televangelist, make their heads throb with memory, make them see with new eyes Christ's wounds as KS lesions, Christ's thin body AIDS-thin, his shrunken chest, pneumonia-deflated, his broken limbs, his pierced hands: stigmata of this unholy plague. Let the spilled blood which angels gathered, Christ's blood be understood: it is shared and infected blood.  
Even John O'Connor, even Bob Dole, Giuliani and Gingrich, Jesse Helms and Pat Robertson -- tear open their hearts, let them burn with compassion, stun them with understanding, ravish their violent, politick, cynical souls, make them wiser, better, braver people. You can. You, after all, are God. This is not too much to ask."  
  
With each "You" he seemed to draw a bit away from us and into his own dialogue, challenging the God he had faithfully served, demanding a response. It was almost scathing. "You, God, where are You in this hour of need?"  
  
"Grant us an end to this pandemic: Why, after all, a pandemic? Why now? Give aid to the needy, not AIDS, give assistance to those seeking justice, not further impediment. Find some other way to teach us your lessons: we are eager to learn, only reluctant to die.  
Bring back our dead, all our dead, give us certain knowledge of the future recovery of all those we've lost, restitution of all those we've lost, in Paradise, if not on Earth, but guarantee it. Don't ask faith of people who have last so much. Don't DARE. . ."  
  
His voice rang in anger on that word. No, God. I can't let you do that, I can't be a party to that. I refuse to brush off and ignore the gaping needs You have left us.  
  
"Must grace fall so unevenly on the earth? Must goodness precipitate from sky to ground so infrequently? We are parched for goodness, we perish for lack of lively rain; there's a drought for want of grace, everywhere. Surely this has not escaped your notice? All life hesitates now, wondering: In the night which has descended, in the dry endless night that's fallen instead of the expected rain: Where are you?"  
  
And then anguished, lost. Seeking a loving God and being defied by men with hearts of Earth. Betrayal. If one is in a personal relationship with God, perhaps one can't help feel the kind of rage focused on those we love best.  
  
  
"If prayer is beseeching, a seeking after the hidden heart and face of God, then this peremptory, querulous, insistent demanding, this pounding at your door cannot be called a prayer. This importunate sleeve-tugging while you are distracted, concerned, perhaps with something more important, holding the earth to its orbit, perhaps, keeping it from careening into the sun; or perhaps you tend another world other than ours, and do a better job with that one, where there is nothing like AIDS, and your tutelage is gentler, and the lessons are easier to learn.   
Your silence, again, is outrageous to me, it places you impossibly among the ranks of the monstrously indifferent, no better than a Washington politician, not better that an Albany Republican, Alfonse D'Amato, something that meager, that immured against Justice. Where you must not be placed. "  
  
A warning almost. Let not this be God; let us turn from such ways, let us reexamine our service to a God so small and petty.   
  
"I am in the habit of hoping."  
  
Oh, yes, Jeff, and you keep the world around you hoping as well. Even more so for your hope that rises out of an unflinching examination of the reasons for despair. You taught me to hope.  
  
"But it's become wrong to draw hope from this conflagration: If holocaust alone is the only lesson we attend to, then what batwinged butcher angel is our teacher, and towards what conceivable future, along the banks of what river of the dead, do we make our way. . .?  
If you cannot do these things for us, we will do them for ourselves, but slowly, because we can't see far ahead. At least give us time to accomplish the future. We had a pact; you engendered us. Don't expect that we will forgive you if you allow us to be endangered. Forgiveness, too, is a lesson loss doesn't teach.  
I almost know you are there. I think you are our home. At present we are homeless, or imagine ourselves to be. Bleeding life in the universe of wounds. Be thou more sheltering, God. Pay more attention."   
  
Ending, finally, with a voice that was both pleading and defiant. Please, please God. Where have You gone? 


	7. Chapter 6

Chapter 6  
  
One of the things that I loved most about them was that they were willing to be angry and to ask questions. They admitted their confusion most openly. Jeff once said, offhandedly but unforgettably, that "anyone who has read the Bible and hasn't felt some real conflict has not read it closely, or simply has no imagination." That surprised me, with its absolute scorn (Jeff, whether or not I have done him justice, generally demonstrates a great deal of patience), but he insisted it was true. "Even the simple stories -- Sarah and Hagar, Sarah the great matriarch treats Hagar and her child -- whose birth she brings about -- horribly. Does that mean just that humans are fallible? Are we supposed to ignore it because our sympathy is supposed to lie with Sarah, and more overtly, with Abraham? Are we supposed to take the lesson that a good cause can still be handled with cruelty and callousness? Or Cain and Abel -- why didn't or couldn't or wouldn't God accept Cain's gift, also?"   
Camilla added, "Or the Exodus. I had nightmares for months about the angel of death, and I felt horribly betrayed. This was the God of love they told me about? This same God who killed the firstborn sons of Egypt? I have an older brother. How could I hear the story and not ache for them?"  
  
"And the story of Noah," Jeff said. "We act like it's this cute little story -- look at the animals, boys and girls! And it's this terrifying act of vengeance and destruction. God gets irritated and he wipes out an entire population -- men, women, children, babies. And He does it over and over again."  
  
Science, particularly for Jeff, was a sore spot as has been mentioned previously; Camilla was perhaps equally sensitive about revisionist history. "It just makes us look stupid," she said. "I get so frustrated by misstatements about Judaism especially, when it's so important to our own history. Or Christians who say the Catholic Church isn't Christian, when frankly, without Catholicism there might not be Christianity today. Even the Orthodox Churchs arose out of the Catholic Church, and I don't think any of the smaller sects could have lasted so long. Besides, the Catholic Church basically invented the tools for modern Christianity. Codifying the Bible -- there are very specific writings talking about what got included and what didn't. The Apocrypha, for goodness' sake. Is it really so hard to imagine why the Gospel of Susannah got the axe? Written by a woman, condemns the local authorities, skewers hypocrisy among theocratic leaders -- that wasn't threatening at all! Or poor, maligned, Mary Magdalene. All along, people have been arguing that she may well not have been a whore -- she may have been a woman of independent means who threw a lot of support, financial or otherwise, at Jesus, and that made the Church very uncomfortable. They only way to let her stay -- when she obviously outshines the Apostles in faith -- was to demonize her. We'll probably never know, but we do know that texts contrary to the Church were destroyed. That's one of the tricky things about discussing medieval heresies. All we have are the reports of what the Church said they said, usually -- not any direct documents."  
  
"Like the Bogomils," Jeff chimed in suddenly, from where he was doing a physics problem set on the bed.   
  
"Who?" I asked.   
  
"Heretical sect in eastern Europe. Middle Middle Ages, if that makes sense. I forget when, exactly. It's very Manichean, though. The world is evil -- the world is created by the devil -- human bodies are evil -- living on Earth is awful because by definition, it means separation from God. It sounds completely un-Christian, in some ways, but really it's just an extension of the idea of original sin -- the human body being completely degraded. But apparently they had some sophisticated artwork, but we don't know anything about them because they either got killed off when they migrated West, or were converted to Islam, because the Muslims were, frankly, not as nasty to deal with."  
  
"Really," said Camilla with interest. "I know the Manicheans, but not this. Where'd you read this?"  
  
"Sex book." he answered promptly and we giggled. "No, very solemn, Oxford professor on medieval heresy. Very Foucault -- the Church becomes the Church by defining what isn't the Church. Apparently the Bogomils were against procreation, because the sooner humanity died off, the better."  
  
"All right, that's not completely new. Or old, rather."  
  
"Yes, he specifically mentioned this, I think so he could work in that they didn't object to any other kind of sex, which is a very interesting principle. I'll have to remember them, if I do write my sex thesis."  
  
"You'll have to actually read Foucault, not just name names. I get to say that because I have read Foucault."  
  
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do I have to read Derrida?"  
  
"Actually, he wrote a marvelous essay about the Tower of Babel. You should read that."  
  
"That story always irritated me, too." he remarked. "I thought God came off as very petty, and a little paranoid."  
  
Camilla nodded. "I always felt that it read like an "after the fact." A way to explain linguistic diversity. Which is all very well and good. Anyway, the Derrida essay is partly about translation, and that's another thing that drives me crazy."  
  
"That always kind of confused me," I admitted. "I mean, I read French pretty well now, and German less well, but I always know when I'm reading it that it's not the same, and that if it's a translation, it's different."  
  
"Of course it is," said Camilla, warming up again. "The Bible wasn't written in English, and there are all kinds of translation issues. It's an utter cop-out to say that because it was divinely inspired, it's free from error. Humans recorded it, and humans make all kinds of errors. And we know there are some errors, because there are editions that changed. All through the Middle Ages, there was a verse in Exodus that got mistranslated from the Hebrew, saying that Moses had horns, when the original word meant he had light coming from his head, or face. And that's why in all these medieval Biblical illustrations, and up to Michaelangelo's statue, Moses has horns.  
"And the point is, you can't even say "maybe he did have horns" -- although that would be pretty funny -- because it got changed back. You don't find that in modern translations. So even if it got "corrected" by divine inspiration, it took God an awful long time to get around to it."  
  
Jeff frowned. "You know, I don't think I've ever seen a fundamentalist explanation for that. Maybe I'll look online later."  
  
"And," said Camilla, "there are all kinds of other problems with translation."  
  
"In general, or in the Bible?"  
  
"Well, both -- it's sad how little gets translated in America, really, there are lots of great writers in eastern Europe who will never be read here because the translations are too poor or too expensive -- but in terms of the Bible, there are tons. I don't really think you can be fundamentalist from a translation, but then, I translated letters for the historical society one summer, so I may be biased. But unless you're reading in Hebrew, Aramaic or ancient Greek, I'm suspicious. And when you look at the King James Bible, it's so heavily and obviously influenced by Shakespearean language. Which makes sense, since Shakespeare practically invented so much of the language and made it do new things. Harold Bloom isn't being entirely facetious when he says that Shakespeare "invented" the human.  
And then there are all the times that are just misleading. Like, well, Sodom and Gomorrah."   
  
She looked at me kind of carefully; she was trying to tread lightly here.  
  
"Linguistically. It's sort of circular reasoning -- the word sodomy comes from Sodom, but that isn't a name for a city. It comes from the word "the burned city" or "place," maybe."  
  
"I thought you were going to say the hospitality bit," I said kind of flatly. "Frankly, I've never been convinced that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was about being inhospitable." I tried to make my voice light, but it's hard -- this is, after all, the basis upon which I've been excluded from righteousness.   
  
"Well," Jeff said thoughtfully, "that is somewhat arguable. Partly because Jesus himself brings it up later, and usually in the context of pride, not lust. But there's a pretty solid argument for the story being an indictment of violence, not sex. The idea that the angels might have been thought to be spies, and it would have been -- well, maybe not an act of war, but an act of violence."  
  
"That doesn't really explain the virgin daughters."  
  
"I'm not sure there is a good explanation for the virgin daughters," Camilla said. "In that context, it's supposed to be a lesser crime, and, well, it's historical context. The rape of Dinah is just as bad."  
  
"That is the most bizarre story!" Jeff said. "I didn't come across it till I was about thirteen -- they don't do it much in Sunday school, and I just kind of skipped it between Jacob and Joseph. But, sheesh, circumcision as an act of war -- pretending to enter a whole city into a religious covenant, and then, er, taking advantage of their, er, vulnerability, and the whole thing as a response to rape -- it's one of those creepy moments."  
  
"Well, it's in response to the brothers' loss of honor, supposedly, in the rape, not Dinah's suffering. But again, that's just part of the context, and it just shows how you can't remove the Bible entirely from its time." She frowned. "I think that's one of the most, of the many, offensive things about that particular series of Chick tracts -- that there's no comment on Lot offering up his virgin daughters. I mean, if the definition of fornication is sex outside marriage, it's not the best argument for Lot's righteousness. It's one thing -- unfortunate, but one thing -- to see that brushed over in an ancient text, but another to see it put out today."  
  
"And historical context illuminates a great deal of Leviticus, for example," Jeff said. "I mean, there is virtually no Christian denomination that follows Leviticus to the letter today. Orthodox Jews come closer."  
  
"Yes, the infamous lure of the cotton/poly blend."  
  
"And that very helpful section dealing with whose nakedness one should not see. Which is in and of itself an argument for the laws being motivated by pragmatic as well as religious concerns. I mean, in a small, homogenous, persecuted community, you really don't want the family strife of having people sleep with their mothers-in-law. And, more to the point, that community has every reason to be the opposite of the Bogomils, and to rail against any kind of non-procreative sex, because they were desperate to expand the population base."  
  
Camilla nodded. "The point isn't really that we know for sure why those laws were made; it's recognizing that the laws weren't recorded in a void. And once you start looking at context, you have to face ambiguity. Just like when you start translating, you have to face ambiguity. And when you don't, when you try to make the same story fit in the same hole -- is when you look ignorant. And ignorance has never been a good argument for spirituality."   
She leaned back against the wall, still watching me thoughtfully -- theory is one thing, but as she would be the first to admit, no one was condemning her to death based on those last lines. "Someone once told me that depression was an insult to God. It was not very helpful. But it stuck with me long enough to feel like I could rephrase it as ignorance and intractability are the real insults to God. " She shook her head, as if she were trying to clear her thoughts. "By which I mean, I think it's bad for Christainity when we try to take it completely out of the world. Whether it's by using Christianity as an excuse to ignore science or history, or to not accept valid, alternative, ideas, or to say that Christianity is only good; evil is only done by Satan. For one thing, it makes us look weak. We have to keep our faith wrapped up in a box, never changing, never exploring, never interacting, When people ask questions, they get shot down."  
  
Jeff agreed, "That's the thing that has always bugged me most about contemporary Christian music, and books and all -- you can even get fashion magazines with a "Christian bent."  
  
"What on Earth goes into a Christian fashion magazine? Habits? Or just WWJD apparel as far as the eye can see?" I asked.  
  
He shrugged. "I dunno. I didn't actually buy it. But what bothers me is it seems to be motivated by fear, As if Christian faith was so weak that if you listened to non-specifically-Christian music, or read "Lord of the Rings" instead of the "Left Behind" books or if you read "His Dark Materials" your faith would just collapse. I think it's a problem if the modernization of Christianity means isolation."  
  
"Well, there are two Christianities," Camilla said, nibbling on her pen. "Two of any faith or philosophy that has a broad enough base. One is just what you, the individual, believe in your mind and heart and soul. Your private relationship with your Faith. But you can't ignore the fact that Christianity is also an ideology that has been used to influence large groups of people. Yes, it sounds snotty to say that "Religion is the opiate of the masses," but it's kind of true, religion has been used to bribe the lower classes into accepting their position. It has been used to convince people to do awful things, it has been a huge part of the social order. I mean, America is culturally basically a Christian country, Protestant work ethic, Puritan sexual mores and all. And the external used to be so important to religion. To circumcise or not to circumcise, as the symbol of a covenant with God. I mean, that's just bizarre, when you think about it, but it caused all these debates -- were you Christian if you were circumcised, blah blah blah. And I'm sure that's why most American boys are circumcised still, in comparison to other countries. And so on. What to wear. Who can eat what when. I mean, I don't blame people for asking why on earth it matters. There are some answers, maybe -- that the outward forms or ritual of a religion help people focus, but yeah, I understand why the detailed instructions for an animal sacrifice in Leviticus can be off-putting.  
  
"That reminds me -- we had an interim pastor last Christmas, and for his sermon, he told this story someone had written in the 1800s, about how horrible the world would be if Jesus hadn't come. It made me very uncomfortable in tone, especially when he implied that orphanages and hospitals wouldn't exist. My brother leaned over and whispered to me "Isn't this kind of anti-Semitic?" and I was just so grateful he was there."  
  
"Well, that was a stupid thing to say," Jeff said. "The sermon part, not your brother. There were hospitals in ancient Greece. Very much into holistic medicine, too."  
  
"Exactly. Why even say something that can just be proven wrong? It really just makes us all look like idiots. Let's just invent history, so we don't have to deal with reality and make us look better by taking other people's credit. Charming."  
  
"And it's just as bad when Christians dissemble about legalities. School prayer, say. No one is saying you can't pray privately; they're saying, no, you can't force everyone else to listen to it on government time and money," Jeff said firmly. "And certainly no one is making you pray to some other deity. Show me one school in America where kids were forced to pray to Buddha."  
  
"I'm not sure Buddhists even pray to Buddha. I forget, though."  
  
"I was wondering what you two thought about school prayer."  
  
"Bad idea," said Camilla.  
  
"Very bad idea," said Jeff. "Aside from the church-state issue, and yes, forcing religion on people violates the Establishment Clause (and freedom of religion also means freedom from religion), it's dumb to force people to pray. What good does that do? If anything, that distances people from God."  
  
"And I really hate the idea that we need enforced prayer to make people moral -- that prayer in school will vanquish sex and drugs and blah blah -- as opposed to thoughtful social programs, say. But religion doesn't make you moral. I mean, having religious precepts may guide you in developing your personal moral code, but lots of religious people do immoral things (how many televangelists have had affairs?) and lots of people who aren't religious are moral. It's so hypocritical."  
  
"But the Ten Commandments issue is even worse," Jeff said. "I kept reading people who said that they weren't religious. And I wanted to say, have you even READ them? The first four commandments don't mean anything outside of a religious context."  
  
Camilla shook her head. "I do wish more schools taught comparative religion. Not only are Americans woefully ignorant about other religions -- and that's going to get us in trouble someday, I think we really need to better understand Islam to do any work in the Middle East -- but people are so ignorant of Christianity -- the Bible, the history. I don't understand that. I mean, when I'm passionate about something, I want to learn everything about it."  
  
"Yes, but learning about Christianity means conflict," Jeff said. "Learning about anything in depth does. I mean, we live in a dream world here -- this little campus full of scary smart people, who thrive on obscure trivia. Yes, it sounds snobby, but in one sense we're just smarter than a lot of people."  
  
"And so modest!" I said.  
  
He blushed. "We are, though. IQ may not be worth a lot, and we definitely aren't any wiser, but we are a bunch of people who think and argue and question and challenge, and who collect information just for the sake of it."  
  
"And people don't like us, because of that. America is none too fond of its intellectuals."  
  
"That's why we elected our President," Jeff said, rolling his eyes. "My sister's boyfriend sent me an e-mail the other day complaining about him, and he said that what Bush does is the "opposite of language," and I was floored. So true."  
  
"Well, academia is kind of inherently elitist," I said. "That's supposed to be un-American."  
  
Camilla nodded. "And it seems purposeless. I believe that understanding how language shapes the way people think, or how the past set up the present, or why English novels end in marriage and Continental novels end in adultery is important, but it isn't always the easiest sell."  
  
"But at least you do other things," I pointed out.   
  
She shrugged. "A lot of people aren't too fond of those either. Especially at the level of ideas. But then again, I still can't grasp the concept of a Christian death threat."  
  
"You've gotten death threats!" I exclaimed. It may seem ironic that I was so surprised, but even Camilla and Jeff haven't given me the confidence to feel entitled to a place in the world yet. Or at least, a whole place; it was kind of a bargain. I would be "good," celibate, as you like it, if they took the gun away from my head. I used to think Camilla would scold me for that, but Camilla understood too well that survival matters, too.  
  
"Yeah, I have the ones in writing. In my room. For, oh, working on the Open and Affirming campaign, and writing anti-death penalty letters, and once for some songs I sang at a fund raising thingy."  
  
"Why did you keep them?" asked Jeff, frowning.  
  
"To remind me who I am, and who I'm not. Any ideology can be bad, including religion, including Christianity if you let it blind you. I don't want to fall into the trap of believing, say, that people who support capital punishment are racists who want to see black and poor people die. I know that's not true. Just like not all conservatives are fascists. And maybe this is arrogant, but I want to remember to be more loving than that. And that means have more patience and tolerance than the kind of people who write those things." 


	8. Chapter 7

Note: the songs here belong to Dar Williams, Richard Shindell, Ron Sexsmith and Greg Brown. Philip Pullman owns "His Dark Materials," which is referenced,  
  
Chapter 7  
Camilla in particular had been brought up with a great interest in the arts. To her, it was confusing that Christianity, which had inspired such great art, had closed itself off to being derivative and insipid, in her own words. At one point, she found a website of supposeldy Scriptural movie reviews and said, "Gracious, with egos like that in the world, I can't imagine where mine fits in -- and I do have an ego."  
  
"Yes, but unlike most people, you have the superego to back it up," Jeff told her. "But, sheesh, are these stupid arguments. Ooh, it shows parents being bad -- that teaches disrespect, or something. And it's really useless to talk about violence and not put it in context at all. Lots of these movies are really anti-violence; the consequences are devastating."  
  
"Well, apparently only PG or G movies should be made. It seems obvious to me that there are some movies kids shouldn't see, but that doesn't mean they are inherently bad. If all I got to watch was "Mary Poppins," I'd go mad.  
  
"So let's see -- Shakespeare in Love, evil sex and reference to suicide (in the play!) But funnily, they don't count the murder, or the drinking in the tavern. Maybe they didn't get it. Nudity blah blah blah, and you know, I've seen that movie a dozen times and it tries really hard to eliminate the homosexual content. Seeing as the sonnets were written to a man, at least the first batch. Did they not get the girl dressed as a boy thing? And oh, here's a good quote, under the category of ignominy: 'sadness due to the death of an associate.' Since when is that non-Christian?"   
  
Jeff said, "If I roll my eyes even harder, they'll pop out of my head. What else?"  
  
"Hmm. Lord of the Rings is part of a conspiracy to make kids solve their problems with magic, everyone is evil, the movie is evil because it portrays Gandalf as good. Ditto with Harry Potter, basically. Stepmom loses points for "hard realization of loss due to cancer," because having cancer is so evil. I really am not feeling Christian sentiments towards these people. And isn't "A Walk to Remember" about cancer, too? It refers to Mandy Moore/whoever in the movie having a dark, "ignominious" secret that could infect what's his face. Am I confused, or is that just really offensive?"  
  
"I didn't see it either, because the song in the commercials gave me a headache, but I thought it was cancer, too. That's. . .almost unspeakably awful."  
  
She sighed. "Obviously they slam Dogma for being disrespectful to God and making people question the Gospel, so he says. I for one was not insulted. And oh, let's see. The Next Best Thing, for showing a gay man as a good parent. That's what's wrong with it. I mean, all these movies are pushing the mythic homosexual agenda anyway."  
  
"Of course."  
  
"References to evolution are evil, obviously. Alienated teenagers are evil. Man, this is making me tired. And the worst thing is, he's one of those who claims that he speaks for all Christians, and that the only people who disagree with him are not Christian and immoral, because it's the same thing. He uses this weird mathematical application of scriptures that doesn't allow context, and it all works from a starting point. "Keeping the Faith" is bad because it implies that priests have sexual desires. Seriously, does anyone claim that isn't true? That's what makes celibacy an act; it's a sacrifice."  
  
"I'm most offended by the idea that it's evil to depict people with religious doubts, or show parents or pastors or anyone in a questionable light. A lot of those doubts are experienced under great duress -- the loss of a child or something, and it just makes religion weak if we demonize that and don't face up to it. And some pastors are not good people -- no group is universally good. If the only way you can respond to corruption or wickedness is to deny its presence, than you simply aren't being honest. And religion -- especially Christianity in America -- needs to start being honest. Our lies have not endeared us -- they only make us seem more and more weak, that a movie or song or question can bring us down," said Jeff.  
  
I found it fascinating that neither Jeff nor Camilla listened to Christian music. At least, not what is labeled so in our culture. Camilla said it was dull; Jeff said it was grating. However, the two of them had collected a vast array of what they considered to be Christian music --   
Camilla acquired a radio show, in which she played these songs, among others, and talked in between times about the state of the world. Jeff frequently went along to play her sidekick, and once when he was sick and trying to finish a lab report, I went along.  
Camilla's radio patter was confident and smooth. She'd done this in high school, and thrived on playing new songs for people and debating the content. That night, she started with the "post-modern Gospel according to Greg Brown, which I stole direct from Dar Williams."  
  
" Oh Lord, I have made you a place in my heart  
among the rags and the bones and the dirt.  
There's piles of lies, the love gone from her eyes,  
and old moving boxes full of hurt.  
Pull up a chair by the trouble and care.  
I got whiskey, you're welcome to some.  
Oh Lord, I have made you a place in my heart,  
but I don't reckon you're gonna come.  
I've tried to fix up the place, I know it's a disgrace,  
you get used to it after a while -  
with the flood and the drought and old pals hanging out  
with their IOU's nad their smiles.  
bare naked women keep coming in  
and they dance like you wouldn't believe.  
Oh Lord, I have made you a place in my heart,  
so take a good look - and then leave.  
Oh Lord, why does the Fall get colder each year?  
Lord, why can't I learn to love?  
Lord, if you made me, it's easy to see  
that you all make mistakes up above.  
But if I open the door, you will know I'm poor  
and my secrets are all that I own.  
Oh Lord, I have made you a place in my heart  
and I hope that you leave it alone."  
  
She easily chatted up the next caller. "What, I just gave you a song with naked women in it!"  
  
"Yeah, naked women on the radio are so helpful," he retorted.   
  
Later that night she played the oddly unsentimental, post-Oklahoma City bombing narrative "Shades of Gray" by Robert Earl Warren.  
  
". . .and I don't know what possessed me to want to tag along/cause I was born a Christian, and I knew right from wrong." Her eyes sparkled over the silliness of the lyric, soon to be disproven. "Well, evidently Christianity doesn't guarantee ethics or morals," she said in a later conversation. "Can it help? Maybe. Can it hurt? Absolutely. The problem is that we let the religious right co-opt morality, which has put us on the left in the position of seeming relativist. Which I don't think is particularly true, at least not exclusively. I think it's morally relativist, say, to try to impose a national language on America, since it has an overt second class citizen mentality."  
  
That was the kind of song she often played or sang. She sometimes called it "contemporary Christian with a twist of lemon." Dar Williams hadn't made it to my provincial home, nor had Richard Shindell, for whom I fell hard the first time she played a CD. ("Don't worry about it -- almost everyone I fall for is old enough to be my father," she said earnestly.") Particularly, Shindell's song "The Next Best Western," haunted me, describing my outsider status. I wish I could believe, indeed.  
  
"It's the middle of the night, on the Indiana line,  
I'm pulling in a Christian station,  
The signal's crystal clear, but I cannot really hear  
What he says about the Revelation  
I am wretched, I am tired, but the Preacher is on fire  
And I wish I could believe. . .  
Whoever watches over all these truckers,  
Show a little mercy on a weary sinner  
And deliver me, Lord deliver me,  
Deliver me to the next Best Western  
Did he who made the Lamb, put the tremble in the hand  
That reaches out to take my quarter?  
I look him in the eye  
But there isn't any time  
Just time enough to pass the tender,  
The highway takes its toll  
The green light flashes "go" and it's "welcome to Ohio"  
Whoever watches over all these truckers,  
Show a little mercy on a weary sinner  
And deliver me, Lord deliver me,  
Deliver me to the next Best Western  
But it takes light years of nothing to let these stars shine through  
It's an empty road that makes my way back home to you. . .  
At 4 a.m. on 80 East, it's in the nature of the Beast  
To wonder if there's something missing  
I am wretched, I am tired, but the Preacher is on fire  
And I wish I could believe. . .  
Whoever watches over all these truckers,  
Show a little mercy on a weary sinner  
And deliver me, Lord deliver me,  
Deliver me to the next Best Western."  
  
The Dar Williams song "It's a War in There" reminded me forcefully of Jeff and Camilla, although it had no overt religious meaning. "You peacemakers go to the same place as soldiers/if you wanna make peace, well, you gotta know the pain." This song haunted me a bit as well, while Camilla went through the rest of her repertoire (or at least the first layer). The rollicking and hilarious "The Christians and the Pagans," became one of Jeff's favorites, which he hummed while doing physics homework.   
  
" So the Christians and the Pagans sat together at the table,   
Finding faith and common ground the best that they were able,   
And where does magic come from? I think magic's in the learning,   
'Cause now when Christians sit with Pagans only pumpkin pies are burning.   
When Amber tried to do the dishes, her aunt said, "Really, no, don't bother."   
Amber's uncle saw how Amber looked like Tim and like her father.   
He thought about his brother, how they hadn't spoken in a year,   
He thought he'd call him up and say, "It's Christmas, and your daughter's here."   
He thought of fathers, sons and brothers, saw his own son tug his sleeve, saying,   
"Can I be a Pagan?" Dad said, "We'll discuss it when they leave."   
So the Christians and the Pagans sat together at the table,   
Finding faith and common ground the best that they were able,   
Lighting trees in darkness, learning new ways from the old, and   
Making sense of history and drawing warmth out of the cold. "  
  
Jeff was equally attached to the bizarre post-modernist Heaven anthem "Alleluia." "The guidance counselor part is brilliant," he said cheerfully.   
  
" Hey God, we're the bad kids, we're so nasty, mean and vile  
God looks like a guidance counselor, God's got that smile  
God says, how could this be, that's really odd  
I guess I'll have to check my records, silly me, you know, I'm only God  
Alleluia...  
The waves are perfect and the sun will always shine  
But there's got to be more to death than surfing all the time  
I know the signs of self-destruction so I try to stop each new kid  
Don't be like me, forever young, forever stupid  
Yeah, I found love here, but I'll bet you'll find it there  
Where they don't always make the same joke,  
"Gee, you make a heavenly pair."  
Alleluia..."  
  
However, Camilla was committed to demonstrating her thesis -- that people who weren't Christian, or didn't publicly identify as such, were the people saying the most interesting things about religion in this country. "Even Alanis Morissette, who I'm none to fond of -- I own her CDs, but with a bit of embarrassment -- but even she says more interesting things about religion and God than most Christian groups. Lord, even "Jewel" says more interesting things," as she picked out a bit of "Innocence Maintained" on her guitar.   
  
"You're a snob, Camilla," Jeff said without rancor.  
  
"I have high expectations," she fired back, before she murmured "we all will be Christed when we here ourselves say/we are that to which we pray."   
  
"It's hardly an original idea, but at least she says it. It's an active kind of faith. A narrow-minded, hateful God produces narrow-minded, hateful worship."   
  
Dar Williams was key, though, with the shape-shifting "And a God Descended," among others.  
" Well, you mend your clothes and patch your roof  
And slivers of God's shattered truth  
Grow tender as the grass in clean-swept yards   
But a savior came and told us how  
The truth was all around us now  
Abandon house and field and gather up the shards  
Well, a God descended   
And the reason ended   
His life was lifted just above the law   
And now we have to live with what we did  
With what we saw  
Well, you build your faith with strength and duty  
Build your love but there's a beauty  
Well you know the scriptures tell  
There are a few shards left in hell  
And if we want a god we had to follow, follow him down  
Pictures torn out of their frames  
And orgies where we lost our names  
All were gone with time's real desire   
Well, you ask how God can curse you thus  
That's not a question asked by us  
We burned our beds and books  
We fear we've lost the fire. . ."  
  
"I'm very attached to that line about "you ask how God can curse us thus. . ."  
  
Jeff sighed. "I hate to make generalizations, but I find it really frustrating how so many Christians have this persecution complex. Not globally, but locally. So a production of "Angels in America" offends you. Fine. I'd like to think you'd at least read it first, but I won't insist. Write a letter to the paper if you want, explaining why you think it's wrong. But don't you DARE try to shut it down and prevent other people from seeing it, and don't you DARE lie about what it's about. And don't you DARE tell me that the mere existence of this play threatens your faith and your God and use that to justify harassing the actors. It doesn't offend your God for you to harass people?"  
  
Camilla said, "Oh, I know. Here, let me do another song for you. This is the one I got the death threat letter for, by the way, Because it's so evil."   
The song was "The Ballad of Mary Magdalene," a la Richard Shindell. Camilla said one of the things that first attracted her to Shindell was his ability to write in the voice of a woman, and this song was particularly affecting,  
"My name is Mary Magdalene, I come from Palestine  
Please excuse these rags I'm in, I've fallen on hard times  
But long ago, I had my work, when I was in my prime,  
And I gave it up, and all for love -- it was his career, or mine  
Jesus loves me, this I know, why on Earth did I ever let him go?  
He was always faithful, he was always kind  
But he walked off with this heart of mine  
A love like this comes but once, this I do believe  
And I'll not see his like again, as I live and breathe  
And I'm sorry if I might offend, but I will never see  
How the tenderness I shared with him became a heresy  
Jesus loves me, this I know, why on Earth did I ever let him go?  
He was always faithful, he was always kind  
But he walked off with this heart of mine  
I remember nights we spent, whispering our creed  
Our rituals, our sacrament, the stars our canopy,  
There beneath an olive tree, we'd offer up our plea,  
God's creation, innocent, his arms surrounding me  
Jesus loves me, this I know, but why on Earth did I ever let him go?  
He was always faithful, he was always kind  
But he walked off with this heart of mine. . ."  
  
Jeff and I spent a moment just letting it sink in. This is probably the song Camilla does best, and particularly for Jeff, brought up on the tinkling "Jesus Loves Me" hymn, the song takes one's breath away.  
  
"And people hated that," he said softly, his eyes half-closed, curled up on his bed.  
  
I didn't have to ask.   
  
Camilla sighed. "What gets to me, is that I just don't think it matters. The sex part I mean.   
  
Or if there is a sex part -- it's not explicit, or necessary for the song."  
  
"You can have intimacy without sex," Jeff agreed.   
  
"But I don't really understand why it's so important for people to believe Jesus -- not only didn't have sex, but wasn't a sexual creature. Everyone is, really; it's part of being human. And so is love, and that's what it's about. The human side of Jesus."  
  
"I remember once, out of the blue, my mom said something like "I wonder what people said about Jesus? Gossip wise? I mean, he's a thirty year old man, possibly living with his parents, no job, no wife, wandering around with a bunch of guys. . .people would talk."  
  
Camilla giggled. "Your mom is so cool, Jeff."  
  
"Yeah. But then again, her favorite novel is "The Last Temptation of Christ," and she loves Leonard Cohen's songs, so she may be kind of biased on the Jesus as sexual creature thing. But it is one of those empty spots in the Bible. To me, it's really interesting that we don't know where Jesus was for most of his life. I'm not sure I'm convinced he was wandering around India, which I've heard (although it would explain the Eastern elements Christianity brings to Judaism), but he had to be doing something."  
  
"Does that mean you really think that Jesus was sleeping around, and it's not in the Bible -- like a lot of things?" I asked curiously.  
  
He threw a pillow at me. "It means I don't care if he was sleeping around. Although I've always thought it was really obvious that Jesus was really attractive to women. In some way, maybe not physically, but considering how many women show up -- He had something."  
  
Camilla giggled again. "Jeff's version of Jesus always seems like so much fun to hang out with."  
  
"But yeah, it always seems to come down to sex. That was why people were mad, right?"  
  
"They said it was blasphemous."  
  
Jeff rolled his eyes. "It's just a perfect example of missing the forest for the trees."  
  
"It's. . ." I began. "It's so -- not just sad. It's real." I felt really stupid, since that wasn't really what I meant. But Camilla nodded. "It's about love. Whether or not about sex, it's just teeming with love. If you find yourself in a position where you have to deny love, I think you've really lost a part of your soul."  
  
When Jeff's nephew was born, she dedicated "Speaking to the Angel," to him on her show. Another song that challenged the Christian status quo, she insisted.  
"You'd say he's so helpless, but what about you?  
You don't pull the string, don't you know anything?  
Leave him alone, let him be  
'Cause he's speaking with the angel  
Speaking with the angel that only he can see  
Would you teach him 'bout heaven?  
Would you show him how to love the earth?  
Would you poison him with prejudice from the moment of his birth?  
He in the name of love, he in the blood of lamb  
He that never lays blame, he don't even know his name  
So leave him alone, set him free  
'Cause he's speaking with the angel  
Speaking with the angel (the very one)  
that spoke to you and me  
Oh Do you remember?"  
  
"So," I said, "is it possible to teach religion at all? Or does it just prejudice people?'"  
  
Camilla looked thoughtful. "I'm not sure. I was raised to be Christian, although there wasn't a lot of pressure to stay. My brother didn't. But I think it depends on the kind of religion. There's a brilliant line in "Great Expectations" about that, describing Mrs. Joe: "Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion." I think that makes a big difference."  
  
Jeff said, "I don't think it's true that being brought up around religion forcefully indoctrinates you. But there's a big difference between being educated about a religion and being programmed like an automaton."  
  
"It isn't good to force religion onto anyone, trick them or bully them into it, and I don't think it works," said Camilla. "It just separates faith and religion, and once a religion loses its faith, it might as well just go."  
  
"And," said Jeff in summation, "it's a very bad sign, anywhere, if you can't ask questions, or can't disagree."  
  
Other than the infamous Chick tracts, Christian literature was a subject of great interest to them. Again, Camilla argued that elements of Christianity and important ideas about God were in all kinds of places.  
  
"Take Harry Potter," she said. "I think it's actually quite a conservative book about good and evil. It isn't about Wicca -- it's basic Christian theology, just through another lens."  
Jeff nodded. "Same with Lord of the Rings. My mom used to say, when people complained about "non-Christian books," that she tried to give us books that taught us important values in any way -- loyalty, courage, kindness, thoughtfulness. She said those were Christian virtues, so how could any book containing them be called un-Christian?"  
  
I asked them at one point about C.S. Lewis, probably when Camilla and I reread "His Dark Materials," and convinced Jeff to read them, just before the third book came out. I was floored, and a little distracted by Pullman's angels, and Camilla was swooning over the concept of "the Republic of Heaven." "Why didn't I think of that?" she cried. "It's so perfect."  
  
"Well, you wear a shirt that says "deliver us unto each other, I pray," I pointed out. "You did think of it, just not in those words."  
  
Of course, Camilla inevitably found the articles slamming Pullman's books as dangerous, particularly after he criticized C.S. Lewis. "Frankly, I think he's right in some ways," she said. "I'm glad I read the Chronicles of Narnia when I was young enough to just love them, mostly, but when I reread them later I was disappointed. They are sexist -- not out and out, but head-patting chauvinism, which can be just as bad. They are racist -- it's impossible to avoid the implication that the Calormens are supposed to be the "uncivilized, Muslim East." And they are overt allegory -- whether or not that's bad, whether or not propaganda can be art is a whole other question, but they could fairly be called that. And the last book really bothered me, especially the way he dealt with Susan."  
  
I read one of those quotes to her: " This week, Gene Edward Veith (World) cautions us about this new fantasy series. He writes, "Mr. Pullman's real objection to Lewis's children's books is that they are 'propaganda in the cause of the religion he believed in.' That is, that they are Christian. It is true that Lewis intended his stories to teach children Christianity, although they surely are more than mere 'propaganda.' The irony is that Mr. Pullman's children's stories really are propaganda for his religion, namely, a militant and slightly mystical atheism."  
  
"Irony, my foot," she said. "If anything is "ironic" it's the fact that he just what did what he accused Pullman of -- there are absolutely no grounds for saying that "Lewis is literature, but Pullman is propaganda." Unless the definition of "propaganda," like "persecution," is "anyone who doesn't agree with me." If anything, Pullman is the more sophisticated artist -- we demand more in children's literature these days."  
  
"Well, it didn't undo my faith." said Jeff cheerfully. "It's a fascinating argument, though. The Church needs to be stood on its head every so often."  
  
"I don't think Pullman is actually trying to de-Christianize people -- I don't think that matters to him. He's attacking blind loyalty, thoughtless religion -- that's why he wants the "republic" of Heaven, not the "kingdom," -- a republic takes a lot more responsibility. An active partnership. And he's attacking the idea of original sin, and what it means to humanity if we take the position that we are evil and devalued." Camilla sighed beatifically. "Oh, I want there to be a Republic of Heaven on Earth." 


	9. Chapter 8

Chapter 8  
"Deliver us unto each other" was not an original sentiment on Camilla's part either. It came from a poem by Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit priest and peace activist who I'd never heard of. Camilla admitted cheerfully that she hadn't either, until Dar Williams wrote a song about him. "I don't agree with him about everything, but I love his poetry." Sometime after that, she had acquired a t-shirt emblazoned with a line from one of his poems -- "Deliver us unto each other I pray."   
  
The song was pretty unnerving, too -- based on the trial and prison time for his Vietnam protests (which included destruction of war-related files, draft documents and such). I had to laugh at "God of the just/I'll never win a Peace Prize." Most likely true.  
It amazes me, in many ways, every day, that Camilla and Jeff have managed to retain their sense of selves in the last year. I had no such faith or idealism to be battered or shattered on September 11. Yes, I was in shock, as we were all -- shock and horror. But for Camilla, who as I said, has little to shield her from the pain of the world; she soaks it in, carries it, takes it on so as to see it up close -- the pain had a gruesome quality I know I couldn't comprehend, or probably handle myself. And Jeff, too -- Jeff who tried so hard to see the best in people and a merciful God -- there was a sharp sense of betrayal. I half-expected them to become less generous, less faithful, perhaps less confident of mercy. I feared this -- feared losing the people who I loved for their ability to love, but would not have blamed them for submitting to the loathing and retributive sentiments that surrounded us. I watched them watch those first few weeks, Camilla paler than ever, her eyes smudged with lack of sleep, Jeff, usually so centered, unable to concentrate or laugh. In some ways, I shielded myself from what was happening in our odd series of role reversals. What else could I do? I never had pretensions to saving the world -- helping the people who might was more than enough. Suddenly I was the one making sure they went to meals and convincing them to go to sleep (easiest by far when Camilla fell asleep in or on Jeff's bed. Apparently, this is a sin in and of itself -- the appearance of immorality, or some such. I mean, really, Camilla and Jeff are too well brought up to have anything in the neighborhood of sex while I'm around, three feet away, but their temporarily shared bed implied sex, I've been told. "Oh, well," said Camilla. "Of all the things I could worry about right now, my platonic sleeping with Jeff is pretty low on the list. I imagine God has other priorities, too.")  
  
Once the worst of the shock abated, however, they were sprung into action. In all their imaginings, I don't think they ever foresaw a religious war, and they had territory -- ideas -- to defend. Camilla devoted herself even more to her study of Arabic, sharply criticizing those who misquoted the Qu'ran and keeping an eye on the international news and the laws slipping through Congress. Jeff, in that same time, spent more time alone, and I knew when he disappeared he was spending his time in attempted prayer, trying to find a way to talk about what had happened. He, too, kept an eye on the outside world, and it was as if the suffering that he, unlike Camilla, had been able to keep somewhat at arm's length before had all fallen upon him. Not only was his faith in God shaking, his faith in the solvability of problems was threatened as well.   
  
Camilla's unwillingness to buy into the "axis of evil" language ultimately saved him, I think. Camilla had worried and protested for years about the plight of children under sanctions in Iraq, dying of malnutrition and infections simple antibiotics could cure. When she read about John Walker Lindh, she felt, in the same moment of shock as most of us, a sincere sympathy for someone who felt so lost in American culture, a true grief that he had felt the need to flee and fallen so far. And Camilla's determination to see all the world as her neighbors, her steadfastness in her belief of a doctrine of love, kept both Jeff and me afloat in a sea of uncertainty and rage and loss. There was still love. And with love, there was duty.  
Thus, scribbled on our door one day in Camilla's hand was another song lyric, again from Dar Williams "I Had No Right."   
  
"First it was a question, then it was a mission, how to be American, how to be a Christian?"  
  
"What are you doing, Camilla?" I asked.  
  
She smiled. "I think it's time to start the mission." And she pulled out a particularly battered paperback novel and read out the following:   
  
"What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love. "  
  
She smiled beatifically for the first time in ages. "Leonard Cohen, "Beautiful Losers." It's a place to start, don't you think?"  
  
And this galvanized Jeff. Suddenly, he and Camilla had reestablished their task -- to be part of a different kind of Christianity, in a different world. They started an organization, gave educationals, led discussions and prayer meetings, read and sang. It wasn't enough just to dispute the hatred of conservative Christianity they had railed against before. In a world that had been so negated, they needed to offer alternatives. From three to seven to fourteen to twenty-two, people flocked to them, drawn in by Jeff's pulpit-esque readings, tinged with fire and anger and yet brimming with hope, begging for reasons to stay faithful. Likewise Camilla's melodious singing, her sweet voice sometimes in intentional conflict with the words, drew in people who might have avoided the group otherwise. Dietrich Bonhoffeur and Tom Stoppard, Henry Vaughan and Darwin, Shakespeare, Tony Kushner, Madeleine L'Engle and Barbara Kingsolver and Joseph Brodsky, Marcus Borg and Mahmoud Darwish were just part of the eccentric, offbeat opening texts. Not to mention the Bible itself, read carefully, critically, thoughtfully. Someone brought in the "skeptics" Bible and we read that; we read different moments in multiple Gospels and translations. Camilla pointed out how the Gospel of Luke was socioeconomic in concern, Jesus setting up conflict between the rich and the poor, Jesus associated with the outcasts, not the elite. "Not only does he say "blessed are the poor, he says 'woe to the rich,'" pointed out Jeff. "Success, or power, or status, doesn't equal merit. So what does that say about America's claims to be the greatest country in the world?" We argued about the Sermon on the Mount -- if it meant acquiescence or non-violent protest. The study group was perhaps the most effective time -- Jeff and Camilla had no interest in converting anyone, merely in demonstrating their version of Christianity. That several people who had not considered themselves Christian had changed that opinion by the end of the year was "not out fault!" Jeff said, laughing. But really, what they had created in language and music and their own proffered vulnerability was a different kind of fellowship.   
Camilla maintained her sets of songs: Dar Williams ("I Had No Right," "And a God Descended," "Playing to the Firmament" "This Was Pompeii," "The Great Unknown"), Richard Shindell ("The Next Best Western," "Transit," "The Ballad of Mary Magdalene, ""On a Sea of Fleur de Lys") and tossing in other songs as seemed fit. Leonard Cohen's   
The Song of Isaac."  
"You who build these altars now   
to sacrifice these children,   
you must not do it anymore.   
A scheme is not a vision   
and you never have been tempted   
by a demon or a god.   
You who stand above them now,   
your hatchets blunt and bloody,   
you were not there before,   
when I lay upon a mountain   
and my father's hand was trembling   
with the beauty of the word.   
And if you call me brother now,   
forgive me if I inquire,   
"Just according to whose plan?"   
When it all comes down to dust   
I will kill you if I must,   
I will help you if I can.   
When it all comes down to dust   
I will help you if I must,   
I will kill you if I can.   
And mercy on our uniform,   
man of peace or man of war,   
the peacock spreads his fan."  
Holly Near's (at least the version Camilla knows) "No More Genocide in My Name":  
" Why are our history books so full of lies,  
when no word is spoken of why the Indians died   
or that the Chicanos loved the California land,  
do our books all say it was discovered by one white man?  
That's just a lie, one of the many and we've had plenty.  
I don't want more of the same. No more genocide in my name."  
Bob Dylan's "With God on Our Side"  
"Oh my name it is nothin'  
My age it means less  
The country I come from  
Is called the Midwest  
I's taught and brought up there  
The laws to abide  
And that land that I live in  
Has God on its side.  
Oh the history books tell it  
They tell it so well  
The cavalries charged  
The Indians fell  
The cavalries charged  
The Indians died  
Oh the country was young  
With God on its side.  
Oh the Spanish-American  
War had its day  
And the Civil War too  
Was soon laid away  
And the names of the heroes  
I's made to memorize  
With guns in their hands  
And God on their side.  
Oh the First World War, boys  
It closed out its fate  
The reason for fighting  
I never got straight  
But I learned to accept it  
Accept it with pride  
For you don't count the dead  
When God's on your side.  
When the Second World War  
Came to an end  
We forgave the Germans  
And we were friends  
Though they murdered six million  
In the ovens they fried  
The Germans now too  
Have God on their side.  
I've learned to hate Russians  
All through my whole life  
If another war starts  
It's them we must fight  
To hate them and fear them  
To run and to hide  
And accept it all bravely  
With God on my side.  
But now we got weapons  
Of the chemical dust   
If fire them we're forced to  
Then fire them we must  
One push of the button  
And a shot the world wide  
And you never ask questions  
When God's on your side.  
In a many dark hour  
I've been thinkin' about this  
That Jesus Christ  
Was betrayed by a kiss  
But I can't think for you  
You'll have to decide  
Whether Judas Iscariot  
Had God on his side.  
So now as I'm leavin'  
I'm weary as Hell  
The confusion I'm feelin'  
Ain't no tongue can tell  
The words fill my head  
And fall to the floor  
If God's on our side  
He'll stop the next war."  
  
We might debate a song line by line, but those lyrics infiltrated our minds as well and more often than not, everyone sang together. From the beginning, the gathering was made up of pluralistic religious groups (including those who were not religious at all, who came because it was an activist platform being run by Camilla, or who came because they liked the discussion topic of that night, or who came to try to catch Jeff or Camilla in a theological or political quandry), but as Jeff said, "We are not here to proselytize. We are all here to learn. And figure out what to do next." That same thread, though, "first it was a question, than it was a mission, how to be American, how to be a Christian" held them together more and more, especially as Christianity and patriotism became more and more inflated.  
  
"So you and Jeff were actually bothered by the prevalence of "God Bless America," type songs?" asked a reporter from the school paper.  
  
"For a few reasons," Camilla nodded. "To me, it was manipulative, often, and seemed like a media stunt. I'm sure there were congressional aids scrambling to get the lyrics. It also bothered me in its exclusiveness -- atheists are maybe the easiest target in America today, instead of communists. The combination of people declaring, without debate, that they knew why the tragedy happened, and that they knew God's will-- that, together with all the religious rhetoric, really pushed some people away, at a time we need more than ever to be unified. And frankly, "God Bless America," for me, always wants to turn in to 'God Bless the World.'"  
  
"But Christianity, in some form, is central to this new group, isn't it?  
  
Jeff took that one. "Not as an argument, but as part of an argument. We use Christian songs and texts -- or what we consider to be such, which isn't universally acknowledged -- along with other materials to create a place for conversation. Trying to show and tell the underpinnings of Christianity. Not laying blame. Trying to understand where we are in the world. Struggling with how to maintain a faith that has too often been allianced with or complicit in evil. I tend to believe that with faith, like so many things, you "get what you pay for." If you cling to an unthinking, unquestioning faith and use it to attack others, it isn't only that your belief is shallow, but that it can't grow. You think you know all the answers. That's not what we're about. For Camilla and me, Christianity is part of the problem and the solution, and we need it to navigate the rest of the world. Not everyone in the group self-identifies as Christian, though. We have a lot of people who are here for the "how to be American" half of the equation."  
  
"And patriotism?"  
  
"It is hurtful when people tell me I don't love my country, " said Camilla. "Because I disagree with so much of what we do, policy wise and culturally. But that doesn't mean I don't love it. I love it too much, if anything. I know that America can do better than this. If we made an effort -- a real effort, we could practically eradicate world hunger, not to mention the number of malnourished children in this country. There is absolutely enough food; it just isn't being distributed. We could respond to drug use as a medical problem, rather than a criminal one and spend more money on treatment, not building a permanent prison culture -- designed by and pushed for by the same people who moan about the decline of the nuclear family. We could take a real stance on global human rights, partly by acknowledging the very real problem of police brutality. I love my country too much too sit idly by while it squanders its potential and its past achievements. And I feel the same way about Christianity. I'm not a real Christian, because I don't unconditionally accept the Bible as the revealed word of God, but rather a brilliant and flawed human argument. Or because I take political or philosophical stances against the religious right, who have proclaimed themselves to be this era's version of the "elect." I don't see myself as one of the elect; I'm struggling and working and I'd rather do that. My faith matters because I have fought for it, in my own mind and soul and in the greater world. And I will challenge anyone who co-opts my faith and claims to singularize it, who falsely claims to represent me. When Jerry Falwell blamed gays and feminists and the ACLU for the September 11 attacks, I was outraged as a Christian. This is not my faith, where the devil is found in whomever you dislike, or whomever disagrees with you. But for so long, he and his ilk have represented American Christianity to the world. To be truly American is to be Christian, and to be Christian is to be conservative and to be conservative is to attack difference and promote sameness. And I will not have it so."  
  
"And," Jeff added, "Patriotism, especially when it's just a fa 


End file.
